CITY

TRANSFORMATIONS

CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Ricky Burdett and Thomas Matussek
ACCELERATING THE PACE OF CITY
TRANSFORMATIONS
Savvas Verdis and Ricky Burdett

UNFINISHED CITIES
Deyan Sudjic

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

David Harvey

MEGA-PROJECTS IN NEW YORK, LONDON

AND AMSTERDAM
Susan S. Fainstein

14

LEARNING TO FALL IN LOVE

Edgar Pieterse

15

EFFICIENT OR SOCIABLE CITIES?

Richard Sennett

16

THE STATIC AND THE KINETIC

Rahul Mehrotra

18

BUSES: NOT SEXY BUT THE ONLY SOLUTION

Enrique Pealosa

19

CITIES AS AN ACT OF WILL

Andy Altman

21

DATA

24-41

DYNAMICS OF URBANISATION

24

HOW CITIES PERFORM

26

RESIDENTIAL AND EMPLOYMENT DENSITIES

28

INFRASTRUCTURE OF MOBILITY

30

CITY TRANSFORMATIONS

32

LEARNING FROM RIO

URBAN AGE
CITY TRANSFORMATIONS CONFERENCE
RIO DE JANEIRO
24 25 OCTOBER 2013
ORGANISED BY LSE CITIES AT
THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
AND DEUTSCHE BANKS
ALFRED HERRHAUSEN SOCIETY
EDITORS
Ricky Burdett, Director, LSE Cities
mer avuolu, Project Manager, LSE Cities
Savvas Verdis, Senior Research Fellow, LSE Cities

LSE CITIES RESEARCH TEAM

Savvas Verdis, Senior Research Fellow
Duncan Smith, Research Officer
Adam Towle, Researcher
Catarina Heeckt, Researcher
mer avuolu, Project Manager
Danielle Hoppe, Researcher

SPECIAL THANKS
Barcelona City Council
Bogot Secretariat of Planning
Geoprocessamento - Port Region Urban Development
Company (CDURP), Rio de Janeiro
HafenCity Hamburg GmbH
Institute for Transport and Development Policy, Rio
de Janeiro
Instituto Pereira Passos, Rio de Janeiro
MPU Architects, Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro Municipal Olympic Company
Rio de Janeiro Municipal Transportation Department
State of Rio de Janeiro Public Works Company

42-49

THE PARADOXES OF INEQUALITY

Luiz E. Soares

42

CLOSE, YET FAR

Srgio Magalhes and Fabiana Izaga

43

WORK HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN

Julia Michaels

45

IN THE VIOLENT FAVELAS OF BRAZIL

Suketu Mehta

46

SELF, COMMUNITY AND URBAN FRONTIERS IN

RIO DE JANEIRO
48
Sandra Jovchelovitch
CITY DYNAMICS

50

RIO DE JANEIRO

52

RIO: A CITY IN TRANSFORMATION

54

RIO TYPOLOGIES

56

PRODUCTION
Tuca Vieira, Photography
Atelier Works, Design

FOREWORD
The twentieth century saw an acceleration in the process of
urbanisation, of a speed and pace of change that outstripped the
genteel and planned expansion of Paris, Barcelona, Berlin and even
London in the previous century. This process has accelerated even
further since 2000, completely transforming the physiognomy of
some cities in response to profound changes in global economic
and social trends.
Rio de Janeiro stands out today as a city that is embracing change
and undergoing profound transformation. As such, it provides
the ideal setting for an informed debate on the impacts of city
transformations across the globe. This is why the Urban Age, an
international investigation of cities jointly organised by the London
School of Economics and Deutsche Banks Alfred Herrhausen Society,
has chosen to hold its twelfth conference in this unique Brazilian city
that is both investing and reflecting on the long-term impacts of such
intense urban change.
Over 70 speakers from 40 cities and 20 countries will be joining
local urban experts, policymakers, investors, NGOs and academics
to discuss these issues, with a view to improving our understanding
of how to design, manage and live in more equitable urban
environments.
Ricky Burdett
Director, the Urban Age
and LSE Cities
London School of Economics

Thomas Matussek
Managing Director
Alfred Herrhausen Society,
the international forum of
Deutsche Bank

ACCELERATING
THE PACE
OF CITY
TRANSFORMATIONS
Savvas Verdis and Ricky
Burdett introduce the core
themes of the Urban Age
City Transformations
conference in Rio de Janeiro
and its allied newspaper.
At the close of the 2012 Urban Age
conference in London, the urbanist and
social theorist Richard Sennett argued
that the tendency to build large-scale new
cities and neighbourhoods is depriving
us of the social and creative energies of
traditional urban form often referred to
as cityness. He returns to this theme in this
newspaper for the Urban Age conference
in Rio de Janeiro by framing the debate on
cities as a contrast between efficiency and
sociability. This duality is at the heart of
the investigation of the interrelationships
between the social and the physical in
cities, which since 2005 have shaped the
explorations of the Urban Age programme
at LSE Cities.
For the Rio Urban Age conference we
have focussed on the impact of radical
transformations in cities that have
reshaped at times drastically the
spatial, social and economic landscape of
urban centres across the globe. We have
used the opportunity of Rios intense
pace and scale of change to reflect on
the social and creative energies of urban
form at different scales and levels, in an
attempt to understand how they affect
patterns of everyday urban life, in positive
and negative ways. We are interested in
finding out whether the streets, blocks and
infrastructure networks being built today
are guiding us to more equitable, efficient
and more civic lives, or are working against
the grain of that elusive quality of cityness,
fostering divisiveness and inequality in the
rush to build and compete.
This publication is designed to
contribute to the debate with texts and
research by over twenty leading urban
commentators, academics, policymakers
and practitioners investigating the
recent transformations of cities like Rio,
London, Barcelona, Mumbai, Bogot,
Hamburg and Cape Town. It contains
new research carried out by LSE Cities,
comparing the social, economic and spatial
characteristics of Rio de Janeiro with
other global cities, and provides detailed
analysis of the changing physiognomy of
cities and projects in selected urban areas.
The objective of the newspaper and the
conference it supports is to ask a number of
key questions. What are the drivers of these
physical transformations and the global
political economies that are emerging
behind these building programmes?
What long-term dependencies are such
transformations putting before us and
how flexible are these forms to social
and economic change? How are citizens
6

demanding different infrastructures and

questioning the traditional role of markets
and the State in delivering big projects?
These same questions were being asked
over 150 years ago when Londons Victorian
reformers saw fit to improve the health
of their citizens by constructing a major
sewerage system under their city. What
they found was a London subdivided into
small territorial interests, unable to take the
necessary metropolitan decisions that such
a land-thirsty city transformation required.
In delivering the project, the Victorians
created a new metropolitan authority, the
predecessor to Londons first government,
the London County Council, founded in
1889. Put in simple terms, the project had
the ability to concentrate power away from
the vestries and later normalise this newfound power into governing Londoners in
the name of greater utility.
Critics like David Harvey and Deyan
Sudjic have commented on how these largescale technical interventions barely conceal
a social programme from Haussmans
Paris to Robert Mosess New York.
More recently, Carlos Vainer and other
commentators have identified similarities
with some of the developments taking place
in Rio. To implement big plans of large
ambitions from the Rio 2016 Olympics,
the UPP pacification programme, the
restructuring of Porto Maravilha and
investment in major Bus Rapid Transit
(BRT) lines the City and State of Rio de
Janeiro have developed new institutions to
deliver these projects that can be seen to
question the right to the city.
London has confronted similar
issues as it created its own top-down
institutions to deliver the 2012 Olympics,
ensure its legacy and bring about lasting
regeneration in the deprived zones of East
London. The Olympic Delivery Authority,
and the recently formed London Legacy
Development Company (chaired by the
Mayor), as Andy Altman explains, are
charged with sweeping planning and
decision-making powers, even though they
have worked in partnership with boroughs
and local groups. Despite some level of

Percentage of Brazils total oil

production comes from State of
Rio de Janeiro
Source: ANP (2011)

criticism of democratic deficit, broadly their

operation has been applauded for getting
the job done. Hamburgs HafenCity and
experimental IBA initiative both designed
to tackle issues of deindustrialisation and
the needs of large migrant communities
(most notably Muslim Turks) provide
relevant models of intervention and
delivery that take into account the need to
ensure continuity of the urban fabric and
the everyday needs of existing (and not
just new) communities. All issues which
resonate in the urban reality of Rio today.
Brazils democratic commitment to
the right of the city has been followed by
many, including Edgar Pieterse writing in
this newspaper, who have long admired
the countrys 2001 Statute of the City.
This national law seeks to prioritise the
social use over the commercial use of land
and to democratise the decision-making
process in cities through compulsory
participatory governance models. Yet, the
reality on the ground is different. A large
proportion of the urban public believe that
mega-projects are tampering with strategic
priorities through what Julia Michaels
calls a favour-exchanging populist system,
putting the private interest over the public
good tensions that exist as much in New
York, London and Amsterdam, as Susan
Fainstein argues, as they do in Rio de
Janeiro. Despite the significant generational
improvements in Rios social and economic
life decreasing levels of inequality and
absolute poverty, homicides at a historical
low, and GDP per capita double from
its 2001 levels the anthropologist Luiz
Eduardo Soares defines the fine-grain
cracks that are appearing in Brazilian
society and account for the recent popular
discontent and uprisings in Rio, So
Paulo and other cities. How can planners,
policymakers and designers deal with such
contradictions?
The dilemma emerging from London
in the 1850s and Rio in the 2010s is how
to balance the large economic benefits
that often accrue from large-scale projects
to the individual and communal rights
of citizens. As David Harvey writes in
the classic The Right to the City, parts of
which are reproduced in this newspaper,
we need a collective right to reshape the
forces of urbanisation. There is a very
practical dimension to this call that has
repercussions to the way projects are
designed, procured and delivered. Part of
the problem lies in the temporal conflicts
that exist between democratic and project
timelines. All too often, the collective right
of decision-making cannot be practised
because the time frame of project cycles do
not run apace. A city such as Rio that has
not seen major transport investments in
over twenty years is having to think of who
should be connected and how in the space
of only seven years the project cycle of an
Olympic Games. Democratic processes and
strategic planning take much longer.
A second challenge of accelerated
transformations occurs when the
physical and social fabric of the city has
to catch up with structural adjustments
and transformations in the economy.
Neighbourhoods and skills sets can
become rapidly redundant, leaving
local populations economically isolated,
resulting in unemployment, alienation
and increased income inequalities. This
trend informs a second line of investigation
addressed by the texts and research in
this newspaper. LSE Cities has looked
at how public transport infrastructure
impacts on deprived and disconnected
neighbourhoods, and how investment in

new mobility systems like Rios BRT,

TransMilenio in Bogot and Crossrail in
London can bring people closer to their
places of work. In addition to the effect
of transport improvements discussed by
Enrique Pealosa, the publication also
explores how spatially targeted policies are
able to concentrate investment in lower
income neighbourhoods. In this regard,
the Mayor of Londons attention to the
deprived area around Stratford and the
Lower Lea Valley in East London, where the
2012 Olympics were located the poorest
districts in the capital can be compared
to Rios ongoing project to urbanise or
upgrade all of the citys favelas by 2020. To
urbanise favelas means to reconnect them
(socially, politically and economically) to
the city so that the distinction between
asphalt (city) and hill (favela), which
was at the heart of the stigmatisation of
residents of the latter for over thirty years,
is challenged. This reconnection or opening
of the favelas to the city is occurring
in multiple ways. Sandra Jovchelovitch
concentrates on the role that cultural
groups play, acting as bridges to the outside
world, and reflects on the relative porosity
or openness of particular communities in
Rio. Srgio Magalhes and Fabiana Izaga
focus on the role of the State in recovering
the territory of the favela from the parastate of drug traffickers, allowing some
measure of normality to resume. Suketu
Mehta sees their urbanisation as the
replacement of para-state power with the
speculative power of real estate. Rather than
urbanisation programmes leading to greater
equity, Mehta sees them as leading residents
to the inequalities of a free economy. By
eradicating one form of inequality do city
transformations lead to new ones? The
role of the city policymaker or planner
therefore becomes more paramount, which
takes us to the third critical dimension of
accelerated transformations.
Rios current urban renaissance, just
as Londons resurgence that started over
twenty years ago and Barcelonas that
goes all the way back to the 1980s, share a
common starting point. They are driven by
a period of mass investment associated to
a growing city economy. Londons recent
transformation was underpinned by the
globalisation of the financial services
industry and Rios to the income from oil
and gas and its indirect services economy.
The role of the urban policymaker is to
steer this investment into sustainable paths.
The question is less about economic growth
or population growth, but about how this
growth rebalances the city. This rebalancing
is both spatial as in Londons East-to-West
asymmetry and Rios North-to-South, but
also temporal. How are we to rebalance the
interests of future against those of current
generations?
In this context, the need for strong
planning systems that are both visionary
and democratic offer a new life for
big-picture planning, as Deyan Sudjic
intimates. As the Urban Age considers
the spatial and temporal dynamics of big
planning during periods of accelerated
change, it is time to reconsider the best
models that deliver, as Richard Sennett
argues, both efficiency and sociability.
Savvas Verdis is Senior Research
Fellow at the London School of
Economics and Political Science
(LSE) and consultant at Siemens.
Ricky Burdett is Professor of
Urban Studies and Director of
LSE Cities and the Urban Age
Programme at the LSE.

THE NEW FRONTIER

As Rio de Janeiro expands westwards,

a new urban landscape is emerging
reflecting the radical restructuring of the
citys social and economic profile.

UNFINISHED
CITIES
Deyan Sudjic explores the
resurgence of big-picture
planning and defines its
historical context as
backdrop to the Urban Age
discussions.
Pessimism about the transformative
possibilities of urbanism has reappeared
since the triumphant reconstruction
of Barcelona before and after the 1992
Olympics rekindled the pursuit of what
might be called big-picture planning.
Sometime in the second half of the
1960s it had become clear that the public
in most of the developed world had lost its
faith in planning. And a lot of the planning
professionals agreed. It is not hard to see
why. The utopias of post-World War II
planning had conspicuously failed to live up
to the promises made for them. Dynamiting
the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St. Louis
was a huge and visible signal of all that
could go wrong. But perhaps of greater
significance to the low regard in which
planning was held was Sir Peter Halls
book Great Planning Disasters, published
in 1981. Hall, one of the most influential
urbanists of the second half of the twentieth
century, took a scalpel to five fiascos, all
of them intended to have been exercises in
transformative planning. He looked at the
absurdly expensive and inconclusive story
of Londons strategy for a third airport, a
story that more than 40 years later is still
no nearer resolution. He was no more
sympathetic to the Bay Area Rapid Transit
system, which San Francisco did build, at
least in part, and to the Opera House in
Sydney.
Opinion on the effectiveness of at least
one of these projects has changed in the
interim, but the book summed up a view of
the dangers implicit in adopting big ideas
about planning. They are expensive, they
take too long, and often they dont work.
If even some professionals saw things
this way, it was no wonder that in the
wider world of activists, intellectuals
and politicians, as well as the everyday
victims of slum clearances, and motorway
construction, there was revulsion against
any further evisceration of Europes and
North Americas great cities, from London
to Brussels, and Paris to Manhattan.
Even in Japan, a country that has shown
no reluctance to embrace break-neck
modernisation, a generation of radical
students spent a decade fighting riot police
to stop the building of Narita Airport. The
claims of rice farmers working on ancestral
land were far more important for them
than giving Japan a modern gateway to the
world.
From her vantage point in Greenwich
Village, Jane Jacobs stopped Robert Mosess
road building plans, and published her
devastating attack on those who attempted
drastic surgery on the fabric of the city.
Small, she believed, was the future. Cities
should be nurtured, not transformed. Not
everyone believed her. Lewis Mumford
reviewed The Life and Death of Great
8

American Cities for the New Yorker,

under the headline: Home Remedies for
Urban Cancer.
But when Robert Caro wrote
his onslaught on Robert Moses, The
Powerbroker, he made the very idea of
urban transformation suspect. Robert Lee,
Mayor of New Haven in the 1960s, a Robert
Moses for the Kennedy era, appeared on
the front pages to boast that he had rid
his city of what he called the shame of the
10,000 rats evicted from just one run-down
block in his campaign of scorched-earth
planning. But after New Haven burnt in
race riots, Lees approach looked a lot
less plausible and planning took a much
lower profile. It merely became a statistical
analysis, or, at least, it was now shaped by
many small steps, rather than in a single
coup de thtre.
Barcelona changed all that. This was
a city in which architects, planners and
politicians had suffered in the same prison
cells during the Franco years, and were
close enough to each other to be able to
embark on the renewal of their city once
the dictator had gone. It is true that there
were protests about the gentrification of
the red light district, and the destruction
of the El Poblenou community on the
waterfront. But the massive investment in
infrastructure after the punishment of the
city in the Franco years really did transform
Barcelona in a universally popular way.
Barcelona went from darkened, crumbling
neglect to an architectural showcase that
brought jobs, tourists and creative energy.
It became a world city. And as a result
it became a model for other attempts to
transform cities around the world. From
John Prescott, Tony Blairs hapless planning
minister, to the Mayor of Shanghai,
everybody came to learn the lessons of
Barcelona.
It was at least a more worthwhile lesson
than the idea that a single building, in the
Bilbao style, can transform a city. But a
Spain in the grip of economic trauma no
longer looks such a promising model for the
world to learn from. Valencia in particular
is a city that wasted a fortune on the vain
glory of Santiago Calatrava. Barcelona did
a lot of very sensible things to transform
itself. But from the shuttered and empty
Forum designed by Herzog & de Meuron,
and built in a bout of hubris, to the Design
Hub, designed by Martorell, Bohigas, and
Mackay, and built under the shadow of Jean
Nouvels Torre Agbar, without a real brief,
it has shown itself better at starting things
than it is at sustaining them.
Nowhere has this pessimism about
the transformative potential of planning
become clearer than in the idea of big
event planning encapsulated by the idea
of staging an Olympic games in the name
of urbanism. For Barcelona it worked. For
London it probably will too. The eastern
fringes of the UKs capital city had been the
subject of long-term plans for decades. The
Olympics finally put the infrastructure in
place, and Stratford really has had the kickstart it needed to reverse Londons endless

prejudice for looking West rather than

East. But for Montreal, the Olympics, and
the Expo that preceded them, were almost
as much of a financial catastrophe as they
were for Athens. It is curious how in all the
forensic analysis of the Greek economic
meltdown associated with its membership
of the Eurozone, little attention is paid to its
borrowing spree to finance the Games and
build all those pointless landmarks, now
empty, in accounting for how things went
so wrong. All these disasters make it easy
to flinch away from any attempt to address
the large and real problems that cities face,
and to believe that they can be dealt with in
small, comfortable, almost invisible steps.
Sometimes it seems as if all the complex
arguments about how we should understand
the future of cities might boil down to
the resolution of just two questions that
represent polar opposites. Are we best
served by high- or by low-density models
of urbanism? Is the market a better guide
for shaping development than the State?
They are models that keep appearing and
reappearing around the world.
But perhaps, there is another, even more
fundamental, question to face up to. What
can we really do in order to address what
might be described as the urban bigger
picture, in order to transform it to achieve
positive effects? Are urban transformations
actually possible? Or should we avoid the
fall-out from taking risks, and confine
ourselves instead to small, incremental
steps, and attempt to deal with one pothole,
and one traffic jam at a time? If for nothing
else, because we want to avoid the law
of unexpected consequences? Critics of
big-picture planning characterise it as
being concerned more with the image of
development, than with its substance. It
is presented as the product of egotistical
politicians and their officials, sometimes
incompetent, or corrupt, and always
tending towards hubris. And instead they
argue for a bottom-up approach.
Putting the argument that image
building has always been a vitally important
contributory factor in creating successful
cities to one side, the greatest example
suggesting that big-picture planning could
work used to be the Paris of Haussmann
and Napoleon III. For those who
understand city planning on such a scale
as primarily political in its motivations, it
is true that the glory of the city of light did
not keep Napoleon in power, or dissuade
Prussia from invading France during the
year of the Paris Commune. So on these
terms it might be said to be a failure. But
Paris is still a model for those who see the
city as a work of art; a city that is capable
of being completed, and as a result ready to
accept a steady state. This is not an entirely
positive model. The Paris that is defined by
the limits of the Priphrique is incapable
of the kind of change that brought the city
into being in the first place. Paris, if present
trends continue, is fated to become a largescale version of Venice, while the banlieues
would be happy if they were able to turn
into Mestre. Pariss success was also the
source of its failure. The Grand Projets of
President Mitterrand in the 1980s could
only change the architectural language, not
the basic structure of the French capital.
Haussmann did not just build
boulevards, and visually highly regimented
streets. He installed the sewers that
allowed Paris to escape from the medieval
scourge of cholera. The dispossessed of
Paris had to pay a price. For those who are
looking to find a negative impact from the
transformation of Morro da Providncia
in Rio into the Porto Maravilha, the citys

promised glittering new waterfront, or the

pacification of the Complexo do Alemo, or,
for that matter, the rebuilding of the centre
of Mumbai and of Shanghai, Haussmanns
Paris provided a clue about what was to
come. Paris was a century and a half ahead
of Rio, Shanghai and Mumbai in seeing the
eviction of existing communities from the
homes they had occupied for a generation or
two, to barrack life on the outer edges of the
city, while wealthy speculators have profited
from their forced departure. The same
pattern was repeated in each city.
It is an example that for 20 years
provided an extraordinarily seductive
model for cities looking to use big
events as catalysts for large-scale urban
transformation. Barcelonas recent history
in the past 25 years has a lot to do with
the continuing willingness of cities to
bid for the chance to pour billions of
dollars, pounds, roubles or reais into bouts
of stadium building and mass transit
construction. And it is behind the fetish
that the Olympic commission has made
of the concept of legacy since the Beijing
games, or earlier. Legacy and sustainability
are an inevitable part of the rhetoric of the
modern games now. Even Athens was able
to persuade itself for a moment that it was
bankrupting Greece for the sake of the
Games in order to secure its future. The
danger is that in regarding the big picture
with suspicion, we end up with the worst
of all worlds when we cannot avoid the
challenge.
Rio is far from alone in facing the
difficult questions about big-picture
planning. The history of social housing in
Britain, where in some areas there have been
three cycles of demolition and rebuilding to
different models in a single lifetime, would
suggest the difficulty of expecting a big-idea
approach to cities to work. Whatever we do,
no matter how much we invest, gains are
only temporary; one generations modernist
utopia inexorably seems to turn into the
slums of the next. The argument in London,
about how to deal with Heathrow airport
that is choking with passengers to the point
that it is undermining the economic future
of London, and so of Britain as a whole,
reflects the reluctance, both of governments
and the political class, to face up to large
questions. But it is worth pointing out that
Heathrow, Europes busiest airport, was not
the product of a grand plan, but a series of
accidents, and unintended consequences.
Londons first international airport in the
1920s and 1930s was in Croydon, far to the
South of the city. Heathrow was an accident.
Its first runway was built at the end of
World War II as a jumping-off point for
British bombers to attack Germany. In the
postwar period, it became a civilian airport
by default, with a tent for a departure hall.
And it has gone on growing ever since.
Britain is divided between those who
see Isambard Kingdom Brunel the great
nineteenth-century engineer as a hero,
and those who regard him as a heroic
failure. Of course, Brunels idea of a broadgauge railway was technically superior to
the standard gauge that almost the whole
world adopted. If all the existing railways
had been torn up and relayed to Brunels
broad gauge, it would have produced a
better railway. But it was already too late:
the world was full of expensive locomotives
that could only run on the existing tracks.
There was no point in wasting time on
what might be better. Broad gauge was
better than standard, but it was not the best
possible railway. A more effective engineer
would have focused on making the best of
the possible.

The fundamental questions for any city

in search of a transformative future are;
does it have the ability to articulate a vision
shared by its citizens, and does it have the
ability to make the vision possible? Rio saw
the consequences of big-picture planning
half a century ago, when Brazils president
Juscelino Kubitchek decided to follow the
promises of the countrys constitution, and
move the national capital to the entirely
new city of Braslia. The problem for
those who question how appropriate bigpicture planning can be is that the issues
facing cities have only grown larger and
more complex. No matter how much we
might wish to address them differently,
big problems require a response on an
appropriate scale.
Ignoring the issues of mobility, of
poverty, of security and development, can
only make matters more difficult. Leaving
those who can afford the cost to create
private enclaves with their own police,
energy, and services, is clearly an approach
that only creates more problems in the
future. There are big things happening to
the world cities, whether we want them to,

or not. Years ago, I compared urbanism to

meteorology. If you look carefully enough,
you can tell when it is going to rain, but you
cant make it rain. Technologically, that is
probably no longer true. Beijing certainly
did its best to modify the weather during
the Olympics.
But if weather is no longer an
appropriate analogy for understanding
cities, then perhaps it is also important to
understand that art is neither. When Jane
Jacobs wrote The Life and Death of Great
American Cities (1961), she also suggested
that a city cannot be a work of art. But that
does not mean we should abandon the
idea of facing up to the large and troubling
problems that cities must address if they
are to flourish. The point is that there is
no one single plan. Just as the city is never
finished, there is never just one plan either:
there is always the need to formulate the
next one, and to explore the idea of another
transformation.
Deyan Sudjic is Director of the
Design Museum, London and coeditor of Living in the Endless City.

THE RIGHT
TO THE CITY
In an extract from his classic
essay, David Harvey offers a
critical insight on the social,
political and economic forces
behind urban change.
We live in an era when ideals of human
rights have moved centre stage both
politically and ethically. A great deal of
energy is expended in promoting their
significance for the construction of a better
world. But for the most part the concepts
circulating do not fundamentally challenge
hegemonic liberal and neo-liberal market
logics, or the dominant modes of legality
and state action. We live, after all, in a world
in which the rights of private property and
the profit rate trump all other notions of
rights. I here want to explore another type
of human right, that of the right to the city.
Has the astonishing pace and scale of
urbanisation over the last hundred years
contributed to human well-being? The city,
in the words of urban sociologist Robert
Park, is:
mans most successful attempt to remake
the world he lives in more after his hearts
desire. But, if the city is the world which
man created, it is the world in which he
is henceforth condemned to live. Thus,
indirectly, and without any clear sense of the
nature of his task, in making the city man
has remade himself.1

The question of what kind of city we want

cannot be divorced from that of what
kind of social ties, relationship to nature,
lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic
values we desire. The right to the city is
far more than the individual liberty to
access urban resources: it is a right to
change ourselves by changing the city. It

is, moreover, a common rather than an

individual right since this transformation
inevitably depends upon the exercise of a
collective power to reshape the processes
of urbanisation. The freedom to make and
remake our cities and ourselves is, I want
to argue, one of the most precious yet most
neglected of our human rights.
From their inception, cities have
arisen through geographical and social
concentrations of a surplus product.
Urbanisation has always been, therefore,
a class phenomenon, since surpluses are
extracted from somewhere and from
somebody, while the control over their
disbursement typically lies in a few hands.
This general situation persists under
capitalism, of course; but since urbanisation
depends on the mobilisation of a surplus
product, an intimate connection emerges
between the development of capitalism and
urbanisation. Capitalists have to produce a
surplus product in order to produce surplus
value; this in turn must be reinvested
in order to generate more surplus value.
The result of continued reinvestment is
the expansion of surplus production at a
compound rate hence the logistic curves
(money, output and population) attached
to the history of capital accumulation,
paralleled by the growth path of
urbanisation under capitalism.
The perpetual need to find profitable
terrains for capital-surplus production and
absorption shapes the politics of capitalism.
It also presents the capitalist with a number
of barriers to continuous and trouble-free
expansion. If labour is scarce and wages
are high, either existing labour has to be
disciplined technologically induced
unemployment or an assault on organised
working-class power are two prime
methods or fresh labour forces must be

found by immigration, export of capital or

proletarianisation of hitherto independent
elements of the population. Capitalists must
also discover new means of production in
general and natural resources in particular,
which puts increasing pressure on the
natural environment to yield up necessary
raw materials and absorb the inevitable
waste. They need to open up terrains for
raw-material extraction often the objective
of imperialist and neo-colonial endeavours.
The coercive laws of competition also
force the continuous implementation of new
technologies and organisational forms, since
these enable capitalists to out-compete those
using inferior methods. Innovations define
new wants and needs, reduce the turnover
time of capital and lessen the friction of
distance, which limits the geographical
range within which the capitalist can search
for expanded labour supplies, raw materials,
and so on. If there is not enough purchasing
power in the market, then new markets
must be found by expanding foreign trade,
promoting novel products and lifestyles,
creating new credit instruments, and debtfinancing state and private expenditures.
If, finally, the profit rate is too low, then
state regulation of ruinous competition,
monopolisation (mergers and acquisitions)
and capital exports provide ways out.
If any of the above barriers cannot
be circumvented, capitalists are unable
profitably to reinvest their surplus product.
Capital accumulation is blocked, leaving
them facing a crisis, in which their capital
can be devalued and in some instances even
physically wiped out. Surplus commodities
can lose value or be destroyed, while
productive capacity and assets can be
written down and left unused; money itself
can be devalued through inflation, and
labour through massive unemployment.
How, then, has the need to circumvent
these barriers and to expand the terrain
of profitable activity driven capitalist
urbanisation? I argue here that urbanisation
has played a particularly active role,
alongside such phenomena as military
expenditures, in absorbing the surplus
product that capitalists perpetually produce
in their search for profits.
[....]
Property and pacification
As in all the preceding phases, this most
recent radical expansion of the urban
process has brought with it incredible
transformations of lifestyle. Quality of
urban life has become a commodity,
as has the city itself, in a world where
consumerism, tourism, cultural and
knowledge-based industries have become
major aspects of the urban political
economy. The postmodernist penchant for
encouraging the formation of market niches
in both consumer habits and cultural
forms surrounds the contemporary
urban experience with an aura of freedom
of choice, provided you have the money.
Shopping malls, multiplexes and box
stores proliferate, as do fast-food and
artisanal market-places. We now have,
as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts
it, pacification by cappuccino. Even
the incoherent, bland and monotonous
suburban tract development that continues
to dominate in many areas now gets its
antidote in a new urbanism movement
that touts the sale of community and
boutique lifestyles to fulfil urban dreams.
This is a world in which the neo-liberal
ethic of intense possessive individualism,
and its cognate of political withdrawal
from collective forms of action, becomes
the template for human socialisation.2

The defence of property values becomes

of such paramount political interest that,
as Mike Davis points out, the homeowner
associations in the state of California
become bastions of political reaction, if not
of fragmented neighbourhood fascisms.3
We increasingly live in divided and
conflict-prone urban areas. In the past
three decades, the neo-liberal turn has
restored class power to rich elites. Fourteen
billionaires have emerged in Mexico since
then, and in 2006 that country boasted the
richest man on earth, Carlos Slim, at the
same time as the incomes of the poor had
either stagnated or diminished. The results
are indelibly etched on the spatial forms
of our cities, which increasingly consist
of fortified fragments, gated communities
and privatised public spaces kept under
constant surveillance. In the developing
world in particular, the city is splitting
into different separated parts, with the
apparent formation of many micro-states.
Wealthy neighbourhoods provided with all
kinds of services, such as exclusive schools,
golf courses, tennis courts and private
police patrolling the area around the clock
intertwine with illegal settlements where
water is available only at public fountains,
no sanitation system exists, electricity
is pirated by a privileged few, the roads
become mud streams whenever it rains,
and where house-sharing is the norm.
Each fragment appears to live and function
autonomously, sticking firmly to what it
has been able to grab in the daily fight for
survival.4
Under these conditions, ideals of urban
identity, citizenship and belonging already
threatened by the spreading malaise of a
neo-liberal ethic become much harder to
sustain. Privatised redistribution through
criminal activity threatens individual
security at every turn, prompting popular
demands for police suppression. Even
the idea that the city might function as a
collective body politic, a site within and
from which progressive social movements
might emanate, appears implausible. There
are, however, urban social movements
seeking to overcome isolation and reshape
the city in a different image from that
put forward by the developers, who are
backed by finance, corporate capital and an
increasingly entrepreneurially minded local
state apparatus.
Dispossessions
Surplus absorption through urban
transformation has an even darker aspect.
It has entailed repeated bouts of urban
restructuring through creative destruction,
which nearly always has a class dimension
since it is the poor, the underprivileged and
those marginalised from political power
that suffer first and foremost from this
process. Violence is required to build the
new urban world on the wreckage of the old.
Haussmann tore through the old Parisian
slums, using powers of expropriation in the
name of civic improvement and renovation.
He deliberately engineered the removal of
much of the working class and other unruly
elements from the city centre, where they
constituted a threat to public order and
political power. He created an urban form
where it was believed incorrectly, as it
turned out in 1871 that sufficient levels
of surveillance and military control could
be attained to ensure that revolutionary
movements would easily be brought to heel.
Nevertheless, as Engels pointed out in 1872:
In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one
method of solving the housing question
after its fashion that is to say, of solving it
9

10

OPENING UP THE HILLS

A new cable car connects the hills to the

asphalt in the Complexo do Alemo, one
of Rios most visible, sprawling favelas.

11

12

13

in such a way that the solution continually

reproduces the question anew. This method
is called Haussmann No matter how
different the reasons may be, the result is
always the same; the scandalous alleys and
lanes disappear to the accompaniment of
lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on
account of this tremendous success, but
they appear again immediately somewhere
else The same economic necessity which
produced them in the first place, produces
them in the next place.5

It took more than a hundred years to

complete the embourgeoisement of central
Paris, with the consequences seen in recent
years of uprisings and mayhem in those
isolated suburbs that trap marginalised
immigrants, unemployed workers and
youth. The sad point here, of course, is that
what Engels described recurs throughout
history. Robert Moses took a meat axe
to the Bronx, in his infamous words,
bringing forth long and loud laments from
neighbourhood groups and movements.
In the cases of Paris and New York, once
the power of state expropriations had been
successfully resisted and contained, a more
insidious and cancerous progression took
hold through municipal fiscal discipline,
property speculation and the sorting of
land-use according to the rate of return for
its highest and best use. Engels understood
this sequence all too well:
The growth of the big modern cities gives
the land in certain areas, particularly in
those areas which are centrally situated,
an artificially and colossally increasing
value; the buildings erected on these areas
depress this value instead of increasing
it, because they no longer belong to the
changed circumstances. They are pulled
down and replaced by others. This takes
place above all with workers houses which
are situated centrally and whose rents, even
with the greatest overcrowding, can never,
or only very slowly, increase above a certain
maximum. They are pulled down and in
their stead shops, warehouses and public
buildings are erected.6

Though this description was written in

1872, it applies directly to contemporary
urban development in much of Asia Delhi,
Seoul, Mumbai as well as gentrification in
New York. A process of displacement and
what I call accumulation by dispossession
lie at the core of urbanisation under
capitalism.7 It is the mirror image of capital
absorption through urban redevelopment,
and is giving rise to numerous conflicts
over the capture of valuable land from lowincome populations that may have lived
there for many years.
Consider the case of Seoul in the 1990s:
construction companies and developers
hired goon squads of sumo-wrestler types
to invade neighbourhoods on the citys
hillsides. They sledgehammered down not
only housing but also all the possessions
of those who had built their own homes in
the 1950s on what had become premium
land. High-rise towers, which show no
trace of the brutality that permitted their
construction, now cover most of those
hillsides. In Mumbai, meanwhile, 6 million
people officially considered as slum dwellers
are settled on land without legal title; all
maps of the city leave these places blank.
With the attempt to turn Mumbai into a
global financial centre to rival Shanghai, the
property-development boom has gathered
pace, and the land that squatters occupy
appears increasingly valuable. Dharavi, one
of the most prominent slums in Mumbai,
14

is estimated to be worth US$2 billion. The

pressure to clear it for environmental and
social reasons that mask the land grab is
mounting daily. Financial powers backed by
the state push for forcible slum clearance,
in some cases violently taking possession
of terrain occupied for a whole generation.
Capital accumulation through real-estate
activity booms, since the land is acquired at
almost no cost.
Will the people who are displaced
get compensation? The lucky ones get a
bit. But while the Indian Constitution
specifies that the state has an obligation
to protect the lives and well-being of the
whole population, irrespective of caste or
class, and to guarantee rights to housing
and shelter, the Supreme Court has issued
judgements that rewrite this constitutional
requirement. Since slum dwellers are illegal
occupants and many cannot definitively
prove their long-term residence, they have
no right to compensation. To concede that
right, says the Supreme Court, would be
tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for
their actions. So the squatters either resist
and fight, or move with their few belongings
to camp out on the sides of motorways
or wherever they can find a tiny space.8
Examples of dispossession can also be found
in the US, though these tend to be less
brutal and more legalistic: the governments
right of eminent domain has been abused
in order to displace established residents
in reasonable housing in favour of higherorder land uses, such as condominiums and
box stores. When this was challenged in the
US Supreme Court, the justices ruled that it
was constitutional for local jurisdictions to
behave in this way in order to increase their
property-tax base.9
In China millions are being dispossessed
of the spaces they have long occupied
three million in Beijing alone. Since they
lack private-property rights, the state can
simply remove them by fiat, offering a minor
cash payment to help them on their way
before turning the land over to developers
at a large profit. In some instances, people
move willingly, but there are also reports of
widespread resistance, the usual response
to which is brutal repression by the
Communist party. In the PRC it is often
populations on the rural margins who are
displaced, illustrating the significance of
Henri Lefebvres argument, presciently laid
out in the 1960s, that the clear distinction
that once existed between the urban and the
rural is gradually fading into a set of porous
spaces of uneven geographical development,
under the hegemonic command of capital
and the State. This is also the case in India,
where the central and state governments
now favour the establishment of Special
Economic Zones ostensibly for industrial
development, though most of the land is
designated for urbanisation. This policy has
led to pitched battles against agricultural
producers, the grossest of which was the
massacre at Nandigram in West Bengal
in March 2007, orchestrated by the states
Marxist government. Intent on opening up
terrain for the Salim Group, an Indonesian
conglomerate, the ruling CPI(M) sent
armed police to disperse protesting
villagers; at least 14 were shot dead and
dozens wounded. Private property rights in
this case provided no protection.
What of the seemingly progressive
proposal to award private-property rights
to squatter populations, providing them
with assets that will permit them to leave
poverty behind?10 Such a scheme is now
being mooted for Rios favelas, for example.
The problem is that the poor, beset with
income insecurity and frequent financial

difficulties, can easily be persuaded to

trade in that asset for a relatively low cash
payment. The rich typically refuse to give
up their valued assets at any price, which
is why Moses could take a meat axe to the
low-income Bronx but not to affluent Park
Avenue. The lasting effect of Margaret
Thatchers privatisation of social housing
in Britain has been to create a rent and
price structure throughout metropolitan
London that precludes lower-income and
even middle-class people from access to
accommodation anywhere near the urban
centre. I wager that within fifteen years, if
present trends continue, all those hillsides
in Rio now occupied by favelas will be
covered by high-rise condominiums with
fabulous views over the idyllic bay, while
the erstwhile favela dwellers will have been
filtered off into some remote periphery.
[.]
We have yet, however, to see a coherent
opposition to these developments in the
twenty-first century. ... At this point in
history, this has to be a global struggle,
predominantly with finance capital, for that
is the scale at which urbanisation processes
now work. To be sure, the political task of
organising such a confrontation is difficult,
if not daunting. However, the opportunities
are multiple because, as this brief history
shows, crises repeatedly erupt around
urbanisation both locally and globally,
and because the metropolis is now the
point of massive collision dare we call it
class struggle? over the accumulation by
dispossession visited upon the least well-off
and the developmental drive that seeks to
colonise space for the affluent.
One step towards unifying these
struggles is to adopt the right to the city
as both working slogan and political ideal,
precisely because it focuses on the question
of who commands the necessary connection

between urbanisation and surplus

production and use. The democratisation
of that right, and the construction of a
broad social movement to enforce its will
is imperative if the dispossessed are to take
back the control which they have for so long
been denied, and if they are to institute
new modes of urbanisation. Lefebvre was
right to insist that the revolution has to be
urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or
nothing at all.
This is an abridged version of a text that was originally
published in the New Left Review, SeptemberOctober 2008.
For the full version see: http://newleftreview.org/II/53/davidharvey-the-right-to-the-city.

Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior,

Chicago, 1967, p. 3.
2 Hilde Nafstad et al., Ideology and Power: The Influence
of Current Neoliberalism in Society, Journal of
Community and Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 17,
No. 4, July 2007, pp. 31327.
3 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los
Angeles, London and New York, 1990.
4 Marcello Balbo, Urban Planning and the Fragmented
City of Developing Countries, Third World Planning
Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 2335.
5 Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question, New York, 1935,
pp. 7477.
6 Engels, op. cit., p. 23.
7 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford, 2003,
chapter 4.
8 Usha Ramanathan, Illegality and the Urban Poor,
Economic and Political Weekly, 22 July 2006; Rakesh
Shukla, Rights of the Poor: An Overview of Supreme
Court, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 September 2006.
9 Kelo v. New London, ct, decided on 23 June 2005 in case
545 US 469 (2005).
10 Much of this thinking follows the work of Hernando de
Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs
in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York, 2000;
see the critical examination by Timothy Mitchell, The
Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World,
Archives Europennes de Sociologie, Vol. 46, No. 2,
August 2005, pp. 297320.
1

David Harvey is Distinguished

Professor at the PhD Program in
Anthropology at City University
New York Graduate Center.

MEGA-PROJECTS
IN NEW YORK,
LONDON AND
AMSTERDAM
Susan S. Fainstein
compares three large scale
development initiatives
in New York, London, and
Amsterdam.
During the most recent decade we have
witnessed the mounting of very large
development projects (mega-projects) in
European and American cities. After a
hiatus during the 1990s, brought on by the
real estate bust early in the decade, major
cities have responded to the pressures of
the global economy by using very big,
mixed-use developments as attractors
of multinational business and sites for
new housing. There is a striking physical
similarity among the schemes, irrespective

of the city in which they are located. At the

same time they differ in social outcomes
and planning processes, reflecting the
level of commitment that the host city
has towards social equity. The three to be
discussed in this article are Atlantic Yards
in Brooklyn, New York City; Stratford City
and the larger Thames Gateway of which it
forms a part, in London; and Amsterdam
South (Zuidas).
By the start of the new century all
three cities had converted their economic
base from heavy reliance on seaport
and manufacturing activities to finance,
business services, tourism, and creative
industries. This transformation of function
had forced a restructuring of spatial
relations, resulting in the growth of

office, entertainment, and luxury housing

districts, as disused industrial and riverside
structures were recycled, and glamorous
new spaces, often designed by worldfamous architects, became the hallmarks of
economic success. In London and New York
they form part of a more comprehensive
planning process than in the recent past.
In Amsterdam, where comprehensive
planning has always reigned, there has
been a rethinking of spatial strategies
away from the compact city towards a
polycentric model. All three cities must deal
with escalating housing prices and have
incorporated housing into the new projects,
claiming the residential component as an
equity measure. They differ, however, in
the extent to which they intend to provide
affordable units and to which physical and
social goals are tied together.
Atlantic Yards, New York
The Atlantic Yards project forms part of
a grand vision for New York presented by
the Mayors Office as PlaNYC2030. This
document represents the first effort at
a masterplan for the city since the John
Lindsay mayoralty of the 1970s. To its
credit, the plan emphasises development
in all five boroughs of the city, promotes
the creation of affordable housing, and calls
for environmentally sensitive measures.
But, while parts of it reflect sensitivity
to neighbourhood concerns, its major
projects utilise huge sums of public money
and tax forgiveness for endeavours that
radically transform their locations, stir up
neighbourhood opposition, and threaten
to sharpen the contrast between the haves
and have-nots. The concerns of the plan are
restricted to land use and development;
it does not link these initiatives to
education, job training and placement,
or social services.
The plan for Atlantic Yards did not
originate within the city government, but
instead was brought to it by a development
firm, Forest City Ratner Companies
(FCRC). FCRC had already built three
large projects in downtown Brooklyn
and was the principal developer working
in that borough. Atlantic Yards, like
the other mega-projects discussed in
this essay, was the outcome of a publicprivate partnership. Unlike the others, it
was going up in an area that already was
densely inhabited, although the bulk of
the project was being built over railway
goods yards. Also different from the
others, the project did not originate in a
publicly sponsored plan, but instead was
the consequence of a developers initiative.
The project, as it currently stands, reflects
the form of developer-led planning that
has characterised New Yorks construction
projects since the 1970s, and the reluctance
of the city and state to start projects unless
a developer is already committed.
Thames Gateway, London
Unlike the mayors of New York and
Amsterdam, the Mayor of London has little
authority over the day-to-day management
of the city. Thus, his principal focus is on
strategic planning and transportation. In
terms of the former, he must rely on the
borough authorities and a bewildering array
of development partnerships to implement
his guidance. Both because of the pressures
upon him to produce development and his
desire to leave a mark on the city despite his
limited powers, Ken Livingstone, the first
Mayor of London after the creation of the
Greater London Authority, put considerable
energy into regeneration schemes. The
anti-growth sentiments within the

suburban areas that surround London in

all directions but the East mean that
the major thrust of new programmes is
eastward. This is justified on the grounds
that East London represents the most
deprived part of the city, thereby standing
to benefit most, and that it contains
numerous underutilised sites.
The eastward development of London
has been labelled the Thames Gateway and
billed as the largest development project in
Europe. It extends 40 miles (64 kilometres)
from Canary Wharf in the East End of
London into the counties of Essex and
Kent, covering 16 local authority districts.
Goals set forth by the central government
included 160,000 housing units, with 35 per
cent classified as affordable; the creation
of 180,000 new jobs; improvement in the
skills levels of residents; access to highquality health care, and 53,000 hectares
(131,000 acres) of green space protected
and enhanced.1 The scheme involved both
redevelopment of existing occupied or
obsolete areas and growth on greenfield
sites. In its London section it covered some
extremely poor districts, while further
out in the suburban counties it covered
quite affluent settlements. The time frame
involved was considerable although the
goals were ostensibly to be met by 2016, 40
years was a more realistic estimate for the
entire Gateway. Construction, however,
would be rapid within the western area
where the Olympic Park and associated
facilities were going up for the 2012
Games.2 The overall objective was the
development of sustainable communities
and a decentralisation of business activity
from the present core in Westminster and
the City of London.
Zuidas, Amsterdam South
In Amsterdam, as in London, planning
and housing development nest within
the context of planning guidelines and
financial flows emanating from the national
government. Considerable power, however,
rests at the city level, where, because no
single party dominates, consensus is the
rule. There is less reliance on private forprofit developers for housing construction
than in London and New York, and, as
in London, the construction of social
housing relies on the activities of non-profit
housing associations. Amsterdam, however,
resembles both London and New York
in depending on private investment for
office development and in requiring office
developers to contribute public benefits in
return for the right to build.
Amsterdam Zuidas involved the largest
amount of office space of the developments
discussed in this text. A number of the
office blocks were already mostly built, not
according to a plan, but opportunistically
as a result of firms seeking convenient space
outside the crowded city core. They went up
with little relation of one to another. Many
were bold architectural statements, but the
area as a whole was incoherent, cold, and
unfriendly to pedestrians. The ambitions
of the planners were to retrofit an existing
single-use area so as to create an urbane,
multifunctional space. The challenge was
particularly daunting because this district
was divided by a multi-lane motorway and
railroad tracks that, like the rail yards in
Brooklyn, precluded pedestrian traffic and
prevented design coherence. The proposed
solution was extremely expensive a
1.2-kilometre-long tunnel to accommodate
both the road and railroad tracks.
Amsterdam Zuidas was already the largest
office development in the Netherlands
with 248,600 m2 (2.7 million square feet)

built, or under construction. The national

government envisioned it becoming an
area that would allow Amsterdam to
compete with Paris, Frankfurt, and Milan
for global city functions. The municipality
responded with a plan for the area due
South of the centre that included housing,
retail, educational and cultural facilities.
However, only the office structures were
built. Now the municipal government,
with financial participation by the central
government, was seeking to realise the
vision of a multifunctional scheme. The
project incorporated a larger role for the
private sector in providing infrastructure
than had previously characterised Dutch
projects. The plan was to use the vehicle of
a public-private partnership, with the very
expensive covering of the rail and highway
right-of-ways to be financed by the private
sector. Sixty per cent of the costs would be
borne by the private participants, who in
return would receive development rights for
one million m2 (10.76 million square feet)
in the newly created space. The public
portion involved the city, provincial and
national governments.
Conclusion
The mega-projects described here reflect
the evolution of urban redevelopment
programmes since their post-World
War II beginnings. They also represent
a convergence between American and
European approaches to government
intervention in the built environment as
embodied in private-sector involvement and
market orientation.
At the same time, the European
schemes, while incorporating a neo-liberal
concern with competitiveness, manifest
greater governmental direction and
commitment to egalitarian goals.
The contemporary mega-projects
discussed here indicate that public-private
partnerships can be a vehicle for the
provision of public benefits, including
job commitments, cultural facilities
and affordable housing. They also show,
however, that such projects are risky for
both public and private participants, must
primarily be oriented towards profitability,
and typically produce a landscape

dominated by bulky buildings that do not

encourage urbanity, despite the claims of
the projects developers.
In London and Amsterdam, where
to some extent a social-democratic ethos
still prevails, more is being asked from
developers than is the case in New York.
Also, the direct governmental contribution
to housing is larger, because the national
governments play a much larger role in
financing affordable housing development.
Even in these cities, however, everything
depends on profitability of the marketdriven parts of the project. There are
only three forms of construction that can
generate big profits: luxury residences and
hotels, large-footprint office towers and
shopping malls. Thus, what we can expect
to see in both European and American
cities are projects with similar design
characteristics and product mixes, usually
outside the old urban core and lacking
the layering of old and new, small and big,
that gives central cities their ambiance and
opportunities. The requirements in all three
projects for affordable housing and jobs
represent a minimal commitment to socially
just policies, but the primary orientation
is to profitability and competitiveness.
The extent to which the gains from
increased competitiveness are spread
throughout society depends on the size
of the direct governmental commitment
to public benefits. This is greatest in the
Netherlands, where the welfare state, albeit
shrunken, lives on. It is least in the United
States, where the small size of national
expenditures on housing and social welfare
means that low-income people must depend
almost wholly on trickle-down effects to
gain from new development.
This text was published previously in issue 783 of the
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2009.

1
2

UK Department of Communities and Local Government,

2006.
Editors note: this essay was written before the completion
of the Olympic Park in 2012.

Susan S. Fainstein is Senior

Research Fellow at the Harvard
Graduate School of Design.

LEARNING TO
FALL IN LOVE
Edgar Pieterse highlights
why Brazils urban policy has
set an important precedent
for others to follow.
Ill come clean. Im profoundly envious at
the capacity of Brazilians to do just about
everything with flair and panache. Rewind
to the dramatic waves of colour that filled
Brazilian streets when citizens (with diverse
and divergent agendas) decided to give
FIFA the proverbial finger in protest against
the absurdity of the World Cup investment
requirements in terms of cost, extravagance
and loss of sovereignty. As our social
media and television screens illuminated
with surreal admixtures of carnival,

political theatre, street battles and militant

uprisings, South Africans despaired at their
incapacity to pull off the same levels of mass
resistance and imaginative protest when the
FIFA regime passed through our neck of
the woods.
This powerful display of popular revolt
was striking, because for years I have been
admiring the variety of innovative urban
policy and management instruments
under construction across Brazil as city
governments, citizens and civil society
laboured to give effect to the provisions in
the Statute of the City. In other words, not
only did Brazilians fare much better than
most at democratising their cities, but now
they also seem to be singular in changing
15

the rules of engagement when it comes to

hosting beauty-pageant-like mega-events.
Democratic envy was definitely in order.
Brazils urban policy innovations
include a willingness to tackle the thorny
issue of landownership by introducing new
legal criteria that stipulate that the social
value of property trumps private rights. A
provision that is exclusively in the realm
of dreams and fantasy for South Africans
labouring under the effects of colonialApartheid practices of land dispossession
and the concomitant concentration of
wealth in the hands of the white minority.
Another dimension of the Brazilian
approach has been the profoundly
important legal acknowledgement that
irregular and informal ways of building
cities are a fact of contemporary life and
need to be understood and supported
i.e. regularised if cities are going to
come to terms with their own essence. It
has taken democratic South Africa more
than a decade to come to this conclusion
as reflected in the Breaking New Ground
policy adopted in 2004. But until now the
government remains tentative and fearful
to give full expression to this commitment.
The dominant urban policy approach in
South Africa since 1994 has been to see
informal settlements as an aberration that
needs excising through the provision of
freestanding public housing; a model that
could only be realised on the peripheries
of cities in mono-functional settlements
devoid of public life, social infrastructure,
and economic activity. It was, and remains,
a profoundly top-down model in which
the government bestows its munificence
on a grateful citizenry. This legacy
stands in sharp contrast to the implicit
Brazilian confidence in the capacity and
power of ordinary citizens to take control
of the consolidation and incremental
formalisation of their neighbourhoods,
connected with intelligent design.
In this regard it is instructive to cite
the impressive campaign of the So Paulo
municipality to run a national competition
Renova SP to secure the proposals and
services of interdisciplinary teams, led by
architects, to address the unique conditions
of favelas in the city. Significantly, the
purpose of the competition was to promote
innovative design proposals on the
explicit assertion that auto-constructed
communities reflect a form of tenacious
urbanism that should be acknowledged
and respected, with an eye to incorporating
its logics into proposals for consolidation,
informed by the opinions and desires of
the residents themselves.1 Despite the fact
that South Africa has processed well over
3.2 million public housing opportunities
since 1994, it is inconceivable that architects
or other urban designers are ever enrolled
in these processes. Instead, South Africa
remains wedded to a Fordist roll-out model
of poorly designed, poorly constructed, and
anti-contextual public housing, making an
already difficult context a lot worse.
This example underscores a profound
cultural and epistemic difference between
the Latin and African contexts. Brazil,
and most other Latin American countries,
comes from a tradition in which urbanism
is fused in the cauldron of architecture,
design, philosophy and social theory.
In the African context, design-based
disciplines are generally invisible but also
disconnected from thought about the
social and political life of cities. As a result,
Latin urbanists see the city as a coy lover; a
sensual challenge that can only be engaged
through a subtle mixture of paying careful
attention, seduction, experimentation, and
16

a deep commitment to understanding and

supporting it to realise its full potential. In
contrast, African urbanists perceive the city
as a stubborn, naughty and irredeemable
stepchild in need of stern discipline and
paternalistic/authoritarian guidance.
It is for this reason that it is absolutely
consistent for many Brazilian city
governments to recognise the importance
of slum upgrading, public culture and
social infrastructure in activating the
energies of neighbourhoods and the city
at large. According to Teresa Caldeira, the
penetration of democracy can be seen in the
degree to which living conditions of people
in the peripheries have improved: In spite
of continuing poverty, in the past decades
urban infrastructure and the material
quality of space in So Paulo have improved
considerably, thus bettering the conditions
of the life of the poor in the improved
peripheries.2 This in turn, she points out,
has given rise to a number of rogue and
unpredictable cultural practices, especially
among the youth in Brazilian cities.
Of course I am not as nave as to
believe that Brazilian cities have got it
all figured out, or that any of the suite of
urban reform measures instituted by the
Statute of Cities work perfectly. I accept the
conclusions drawn by Edesio Fernandes
on the remaining challenges surrounding
participatory budgeting, masterplanning
processes to concretise social zoning, slum
upgrading and so forth.3 Yet, the vibrant
Brazilian experiment in democratic and
inclusive city building remains profoundly
important for debates in South Africa and
other members of the BRICS axis. A brief
update on contemporary developments
in South Africa in the urban domain will
clarify this assertion.
In 2012, the National Planning
Commission unveiled a twenty-year plan
for South Africa. The plan asserts:
Reshaping South Africas cities, towns
and rural settlements is a complex, longterm project requiring major reforms
and political will. It is, however, a
necessary project given the enormous
social, environmental and financial costs
imposed by existing spatial divides. []
Transforming human settlements is a large
and complex agenda requiring far-reaching
policy changes and shifts in household,
business and government practices.
Planning for transformation happens
within an uncertain context and requires
foresight, resilience and versatility, as well
as updated information and continually
revised knowledge.4 This statement reflects
a coming of age in the urban policy debates
in South Africa. In its wake, the national
government commissioned the preparation
of the Integrated Urban Development

Bolsa Famlia helped increase the

share of the middle class population
from 38% in 2003, to 55% in 2011.
Between 1993 and 2011 GINI levels
both in Rio and Brazil have also fallen.

Framework. This policy is likely to make a

strong case for a number of the elements of
the Brazilian model to be indigenised in the
South African context, alongside a strong
push for reorienting urban policy to foster
resilient and inclusive cities as a central
strand in the national efforts to foster a
green economy.
It is envisaged that city-wide, long-term
planning and management instruments
such as growth management strategies
will have to be produced for all major cities
and towns. These will have to articulate
spatial frameworks, infrastructure plans,
land assembly strategies, and resource
efficiency targets connected to innovative
financing tools. It is self-evident that the
Brazilian experience with masterplanning
and social zoning will prove instructive for
South Africa.
These macro frameworks at the citywide or regional scale will need to be
reinforced by neighbourhood-level planning
and community management systems.
Since citizens will be central to the
formulation of these, public investments
will be required to engender citizen skills in
spatial literacy, budget interpretation and
community project management. Again,
the now deeply entrenched methodologies
of community-driven planning and
management in many Brazilian favelas
can offer crucial insights. Moreover, South
Africa will have to draw heavily on the
rich tradition of participatory design

that has become the hallmark of radical

incrementalism across many Brazilian and
Latin American cities such as Medelln and
Rio de Janeiro. My hunch and hope is that
such exposure could make the difference
in changing the mindsets of South African
policy makers and citizens so that they too
can fall in love with their imperfect cities.
1

For details on the competition and its outcomes, see So

Paulo Municipality, (2011) Renova SP. Concurso De
Projetos De Arquitetura E Urbanismo, Series: Novos
Bairros de So Paulo, So Paulo Municipality, 2011.
Teresa Caldeira, Imprinting and Moving Around: New
Visibilities and Configurations of Public Space in So
Paulo, Public Culture, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2012, pp. 385419.
Fernandes (p. 298) argues that participatory budgeting
have not called into question the exclusionary nature
of the overall land and urban development model,
especially as they have not significantly supported
the strengthening of a more inclusive framework for
land governance. At a more superficial level, they could
also be argued to have become overly bureaucratised and
performative. See: E. Fernandes, Participatory Budgeting
Processes in Brazil Fifteen Years Later, in: Kihato, C.
et al (eds.) Urban Diversity. Space, Culture and Inclusive
Pluralism in Cities Worldwide. Washington DC &
Baltimore, Woodrow Wilson Centre Press & John
Hopkins University Press, 2010.
National Planning Commission, Our Future Make it
work. National Development Plan 2030. Pretoria,
National Planning Commission, The Presidency, 2012,
p. 47, p. 289.

Edgar Pieterse is Professor at and

Director of the African Centre for
Cities at the University of Cape
Town and presently a Fellow
at Stellenbosch Institute for
Advanced Studies.

EFFICIENT OR
SOCIABLE CITIES?
As cities become more
complex, Richard Sennett
explores the social and
cultural dynamics of change
in the contemporary city.
This is an age of cities, a time when the
mass of people in the world live in cities of
a size never seen before in human history.
The new city of 15 million or more people,
like Shanghai, So Paulo, Mumbai, or
Mexico City, has transformed the politics,
economics, infrastructure and culture
of everyday existence. Yet, as in the past,
urbanites now have two basic desires: they
want cities that are efficient, and they want
cities full of life.
The need for efficiency comes into
conflict constantly with the desire for
sociability. The quest for efficiency aims at
balance and harmony. Sociability in cities
involves complex mixtures of people with
diverging interests; they have to negotiate
their relationships day by day, and the
results are messy.
The distinction between efficient and
sociable is particularly acute for a huge
class of people to whom urbanists seem
indifferent. This is the class that is neither
poor nor bourgeois, the classes moyens,
as French sociologists call them, or the
lower-middle-class in English terms:
small shopkeepers and salesmen, clerks
and other low-level bureaucrats, skilled
manual labourers. These are the people for

whom efficiency means a safer, healthier

environment than that of the dramatically
poor. But they are just on the edge of
experiencing a better-quality life; the
spectre of poverty, which is just below them,
which they may have just left, is haunting.
This is the life evoked by Louis-Ferdinand
Cline in the novel Voyage au Bout de la
Nuit [Journey to the End of the Night], or
by Truffauts film Les Quatre Cents Coups
[The 400 Blows]. The experience of an
efficient and workable everyday life feels
fragile. Class consciousness puts those two
words, efficient and fragile, together.
The sociability bred of this fragility
is often hostile to those both above and
below, and inward-turning. Sociologists
label this kind of outlook ressentiment, a
combination of resentment and withdrawal,
and it possesses a right-wing political sting;
numerous studies show that ressentiment
animates racial prejudices, hostility to
immigrants. Ressentiment is not urbane.
And literally so, groups motivated by this
passion have, as Michel de Certeau has
documented, practised an intensely local
form of excluding those below. But Im
convinced that it is not inevitable for people
newly emerged from poverty, or living a
cut above it. The physical conditions in
which the classes moyennes live can orient
people in a different, more positive, more
integrated way.
As a visitor to Rio de Janeiro, I have
been struck by how much of the city belongs

THE OTHER SIDE

Lagoa is an affluent neighbourhood in

Rios south zone which displays the
citys dense urban typology framed and
contained by its natural contours.

17

to the classes moyennes. Particularly due

to the growth of this class in recent years,
poor people have moved just one or two
steps up if they exit poverty just as was the
case in New York a century ago in boroughs
like Queens and the Bronx, or today in the
expansion of North-West Shanghai. Given
the peculiar fabric of Rio, an archipelago of
different socio-economic communities, the
issue of integration is particularly difficult
in terms of city planning. I am no expert on
Rio, but Id like to offer some ideas about
how a more integrated approach could join
efficiency to sociability.
The Edge Condition
Integration happens at the edges between
communities. Urbanists have in general
been very bad at creating edges of the
open sort; instead, the great urban growth
spurt of recent decades has strengthened
segregation. This is true not only of gated
residential communities, but of places to
work or consume the office campus, the
shopping mall which are mono-functional
in character. Segregation of function has
become the planners yardstick of efficiency.
Edges come in two forms: the boundary
and the border. Rigid controls over
movement from country to country are
meant to enforce the boundary condition,
while the Schengen arrangements in
Europe, for example, are meant to create
more open borders between its member
states. At the urban level, motorways create
boundaries between communities, while
spine-streets create more open borders.
A more provocative distinction is the
difference between a cell wall and a cell
membrane. A cell wall serves mainly to
conserve vital ingredients within the cell,
while a membrane functions to exchange
ingredients between a cells in- and outside.
But the membrane is not, as it were, an open
door; this edge is both porous and resistant,
that is, it both admits new matter and also
resists loss of its own substance.
Porosity and resistance combined tell
something about the concept of integration,
a concept all-important in urban planning.
Too often, well-meaning planners confuse
integration with erasure, a clearing flat of
urban space, destroying traces of the past,
leaving no physical markers of difference
in the present. This is the story of much
urban renewal in twentieth-century North
American cities, and twenty-first century
cities in China. Erasure does not stimulate
integration, on the contrary; the result,
in Shanghai as much as Chicago, has left
people, particularly in the classes moyennes,
feeling exposed and vulnerable.
An alternative way to create a living
edge is embodied in the work that urbanists
did on the reconstruction of Beirut after its
long civil war ended in the 1990s. The green
line in the city was a zone where warring
Christians and Muslims had fought each
other for 14 years; by the wars end, it had
reverted to trees and weeds. The planners
made use of this natural resurgence to
carve out a shaded market extending along
the line of former combat; the buildings
on either side were left to local or family
development. The market structures were
themselves temporary constructions,
quickly put up or taken down. People out
shopping could mix with their former
enemies, but as easily recoil and withdraw.
Such an uneasy truce exemplifies the
urban membrane, which was both porous
and resistant. Admittedly this was an
extreme case, but the membrane logic is
a good one, and urbanists should apply it
to more ordinary urban scenes. Could it
apply in Rio, for instance, to the relations
18

between the favelas and surrounding

neighbourhoods?
Complex Public Space
Our received notions of public space are
one reason membrane creation has failed.
The design of good urban space is an
endless subject, which has preoccupied me
my entire professional life. I want to focus
just on one aspect, one which relates to
mono-functional and multiple-function
spaces. In principle, an overlay of functions
creates public space: the thicker the collage
of functions, the more public a space
becomes. To understand why this is so, we
might contrast the agora of ancient Athens
to modern Times Square in New York.
The agora, a six-hectare (nearly 15 acres)
open space, contained all the elements
of Athenian civic life in plain sight. The
ancient Athenian visiting his banker at
a table set out in the agora could see and
hear the proceedings of a court of justice
occurring in the same space, separated only
by a low wall; if so minded he could shout
out his own comment on the accused while
counting his money. Several small shrines
and a temple lining the agora permitted
him to pray if the spirit moved him; he
could dine and flirt in several private
rooms whose doors gave directly onto the
agora. Not only was this public space multifunctional, it was ambiguously defined,
the edges between activities more borders
rather than boundaries; the Athenian was
constantly obliged to interpret what was
happening in the agora.
Modern Times Square in New York
on the other hand does not require that
effort of interpreting. It has become pure
tourist space, which is to say, its recent
renewal development has made the centre
of New Yorks central public space monofunctional, devoted to tourists serviced
by cheap hotels and restaurants, and, of
course, popular theatres. There are other
sorts of commercial and civic activities
near Times Square, but they are out of
sight, occurring within heavily-guarded
buildings. Few native New Yorkers frequent
Times Square: it has become a void at the
heart of the city.
The recipe for a live public realm
in cities is more complicated than
might first appear. Multiple functions
generate ambiguity. Ambiguity requires
interpretation. Interpretations are unstable
in time. This recipe requires much
unpacking. I simply want to stress that a
live public space is not efficient, if we think
of efficiency as a steady-state condition.
Quality of Life
I have touched on a number of principles
of urban integration, in edges and
public space. They stimulate exchange
at the borders between territories, and
they engage people in experiencing and
interpreting complexity. These principles
have a particular application to the fabric
of ordinary life that is, to people who are
neither wealthy nor impoverished. They
secure the quality of life by supplying, as
it were, rules of engagement. They provide
positive, sociable orientations to the city for
people who may feel that class-bound kind
of fragility that results in ressentiment.
Richard Sennett is Professor
of Sociology at the London School
of Economics and Political Science
and University Professor of the
Humanities, New York University.
He is Chair of the Advisory Board
of LSE Cities and a member of its
Governing Board.

THE STATIC AND

THE KINETIC
Rahul Mehrotra argues
that only kinetic cities and
processes will be able to
respond to challenges of
future of Indian cities.
Cities in South Asia are characterised
by physical and visual contradictions
that coalesce in a landscape of incredible
pluralism. Historically, particularly
during the period of British colonisation,
the distinct worlds active within these
cities which could be economic, social
or cultural occupied different spaces
and operated under different rules. The
aim of their separation was to maximise
control and minimise conflict between
these, often opposing, worlds.1 However,
today these worlds share the same space,
but they understand and use it differently.2
Massive waves of distressed rural migration
during the latter half of the 1900s triggered
their convergence into a singular, but
multifaceted entity. Combined with the
inadequate supply of urban land and the
lack of the creation of new urban centres,
this resulted in extremely high densities
in existing cities. With the emergence of
a post-industrial, service-based economy,
the intertwining of these worlds within the
same space is now even greater.3
In this post-industrial scenario, cities
in India have become critical sites for
negotiations between elite and subaltern
cultures. The new relationships between
social classes in a post-industrial economy
are quite different from those that existed
in state-controlled economies.4 The
fragmentation of the economy in service
and production sectors has spatially
resulted in a new, bazaar-like urbanism,
which has woven its presence throughout
the entire urban landscape.5 This is an
urbanism created by those outside the elite
domains of the formal modernity of the
state. It is a pirate modernity that has to
slip under the laws of the city simply in
order to survive, without any conscious
attempt at constructing a counterculture.6
With the retreat of the state in the course of
the 1980s and 1990s (in different measures
across South Asia), the space of the
everyday is where economic and cultural
struggles are articulated. These common
spaces have been largely excluded from
the cultural discourses on globalisation,
which focus on elite domains of production
in the city.7
Today, Indian cities are comprised
of two components occupying the same
physical space. The first is the Static City.
Built of more permanent material such
as concrete, steel and brick, it forms a
two-dimensional entity on conventional
city maps and is monumental in its
presence. The second is the Kinetic City.
Incomprehensible as a two-dimensional
entity, this is a city in motion a threedimensional construct of incremental
development. The Kinetic City is temporary
in nature and often built with recycled
material: plastic sheets, scrap metal, canvas
and waste wood. It constantly modifies and

reinvents itself. The Kinetic Citys building

blocks are not pieces of architecture,
but spaces that hold associative values
and that support their residents lives
and livelihoods. Patterns of occupation
determine its form and perception. It is an
indigenous urbanism that has its particular
local logic. It is not necessarily the city
of the poor, as most images might suggest;
rather it is a temporal articulation and
occupation of space, which not only creates
a richer sensibility of spatial occupation,
but also suggests how spatial limits are
expanded to include formally unimagined
uses in dense urban conditions.8
The Kinetic City presents a compelling
vision that potentially allows us to
better understand the blurred lines of
contemporary urbanism and the changing
roles of people and spaces in urban
society. The increasing concentrations of
global flows of money and goods have
exacerbated the inequalities and spatial
divisions of social classes. In this context,
an architecture or urbanism of equality in
an increasingly unequal economic world
requires looking deeper to find a wide range
of places to mark and commemorate the
cultures of those excluded from the spaces
of wealth and economic boom. These dont
necessarily lie in the formal production of
architecture, but often challenge it. Here the
idea of a city is an elastic urban condition,
not a grand vision, but a grand adjustment.
The Kinetic City can be seen as the
symbolic image of the emerging urban
South Asian condition. The processions,
weddings, festivals, hawkers, street vendors
and slum dwellers or Katchi Abadis, all
create an ever-transforming streetscape
a city in constant motion where the
very physical fabric is characterised by
continuous change. The Static City, on the
other hand, dependent on architecture for
its representation, is no longer the single
image by which the city is read. Thus
architecture is not the spectacle of the
city, nor does it even comprise the single
dominant image. In contrast, festivals such
as Diwali, Dussera, Navrathri, Muhharam,
Durga Puja, Ganesh Chathurthi and many
more, have emerged as the spectacles of the
Kinetic City. Their presence in the everyday
landscape is pervasive and dominates the
popular visual culture of Indian cities.
Festivals create a forum through which the
fantasies of the subalterns are articulated
and even organised into political action.
[]
What then is our cultural reading
for the Kinetic City, which now forms a
greater part of our urban reality? If the
production or preservation of architecture
or urban form has to be informed by our
reading of cultural significance in this
dynamic context, it will necessarily have
to include the notion of constructing
significance both in the architectural as
well as conservation debates.9 In fact, an
understanding that cultural significance
evolves, will truly clarify the role of the
architect as an advocate of change (versus
a preservationist who opposes change)

one who can engage with both the Kinetic

and Static City on equal terms. Under such
conditions, a draining of the symbolic
import of the architectural landscape leads
to a deepening of ties between architecture
and contemporary realities and experiences.
This understanding allows architecture and
urban typologies to be transformed through
intervention and placed in the service of
contemporary life, realities, and emerging
aspirations. Here, the Static City embraces
the Kinetic City and is informed and
remade by its logic.
The phenomenon of bazaars in the
Victorian arcades in the old Fort Area,
Mumbais Historic District, is emblematic
of this potential negotiation between
the Static and Kinetic City. The original
use of the arcades was two-fold. First,
they provided spatial mediation between
building and street. Second, the arcades
were a perfect response to Bombays
climate. They served as a zone protecting
pedestrians from both the harsh sun and
lashing rains. Today, with the informal
bazaar occupying the arcade, its original
intent is challenged. This emergent
relationship of the arcade and bazaar not
only forces a confrontation of uses and
interest groups, but also demands new
preservation approaches. For the average
Mumbai resident, the hawker provides a
wide range of goods at prices considerably
lower than those found in local shops. Thus,
the bazaars in the arcades characterise the
Fort Area areas thriving businesses. For the
elite and for conservationists, the Victorian
core represents the old city centre, complete
with monumental icons. In fact, as the city
sprawls, dissipating the clarity of its form,
these images, places, and icons acquire
even greater meaning for preservationists
as critical symbols of the citys historic
image. Consequently, hawking is deemed
illegal by city authorities that are constantly
attempting to relocate the bazaars.
The challenge in Mumbai is to cope with
the citys transformation, not by inducing
or polarising its dualism, but by attempting
to reconcile these opposite conditions as
being simultaneously valid. The existence
of two worlds in the same space implies
that we must accommodate and overlap
varying uses, perceptions, and physical
forms. The arcades in the Fort Area possess
a rare capacity for reinterpretation. As
an architectural solution, they display an
incredible resilience; they can accommodate
new uses while keeping the illusion of their
architecture intact.
One design solution might be to re-adapt
the functioning of the arcades. They could
be restructured to allow for easy pedestrian
movement and accommodate hawkers
at the same time. They could contain the
amorphous bazaar encased in the illusion
of the disciplined Victorian arcade. With
this sort of approach, the key components
of the city would have a greater ability
to survive, because they could be more
adaptable to changing economic and social
conditions. There are no total solutions in
an urban landscape characterised by both
permanence and rapid transformation. At
best, the city could constantly evolve and
invent solutions for the present through
safeguarding the crucial components of our
historically important urban hardware.
Could Bazaars in Victorian Arcades
become an authentic symbol of an emergent
reality of temporary adjustment? Clearly
the Static and Kinetic Cities go beyond
their obvious differences to establish a
much richer relationship, both spatially
and metaphorically, than their physical
manifestations would suggest. Here affinity

and rejection are simultaneously played out

in a state of equilibrium maintained by a
seemingly irresolvable tension.
The informal economy of the city vividly
illustrates the collapsed and intertwined
existence of the Static and Kinetic Cities.
The dabbawalas (literally translated as tiffin
men) are an example of this relationship
between the formal and informal, the
static and kinetic. The tiffin delivery
service, which relies on the train system
for transportation, costs approx Rs.200
(US$4) per month. A dabbawala picks up
a lunch tiffin from a house anywhere in
the city. Then he delivers the tiffin to ones
place of work by lunchtime and returns it to
the house later in the day. The dabbawalas
deliver hundreds of thousands of lunch
boxes every day. The efficiency of Mumbais
train system, the spine of the linear city,
enables this complex informal system to
work. The dabbawalas have innovatively
set up a network that facilitates an informal
system to take advantage of a formal
infrastructure. The network involves the
dabba, or tiffin, being exchanged up to four
or five times between its pickup and return
to the house in the evening. The average
box travels about 30 km (18 miles) each
way. It is estimated that around 200,000
boxes are delivered around the city per day,
involving approximately 4,500 dabbawalas.
In economic terms, the annual turnover
amounts to roughly 50 million Rupees or
about a US$1 million.10
Entrepreneurship in the Kinetic City
is an autonomous and oral process that
demonstrates the ability to fold the formal
and informal into a symbiotic relationship.
The dabbawalas, like several other informal
services that range from banking, money
transfer, courier, and electronic goods
bazaars, leverage community relationships
and networks and deftly use the Static City
and its infrastructure beyond its intended
margins. These networks create a synergy
that depends on mutual integration
without the obsession of formalised
structures. The Kinetic City is where
the intersection of need (often reduced
to survival) and unexploited potentials
of existing infrastructure give rise to
new innovative services. The trains in
Mumbai are emblematic of a kinetic space,
supporting and blurring the formal and
the informal, slicing through these worlds
while momentarily collapsing them into a
singular entity. Here the self-consciousness
about modernity and the regulations
imposed by the Static City are suspended
and redundant. The Kinetic City carries
local wisdom into the contemporary world
without fear of the modern, while the Static
City aspires to erase the local and re-codify
it in a written macro-moral order.11
The urbanism of Mumbai represents a
fascinating intersection where the Kinetic
City a landscape of dystopia, and yet
a symbol of optimism challenges the
Static City encoded in architecture to
reposition and remake the city as a whole.12
The Kinetic City forces the Static City to
re-engage itself in present conditions by
dissolving its utopian project to fabricate
multiple dialogues with its context.
Could this become the basis for a rational
discussion about coexistence? Or is
Mumbais emergent urbanism inherently
paradoxical, and are the coexistence of the
Static and Kinetic Cities and their particular
states of utopia and dystopia inevitable?
Can the spatial configuration for how this
simultaneity occurs actually be formally
imagined? The Kinetic City obviously
cannot be seen as a design tool, but rather
as a demand that conceptions of urbanism

create and facilitate environments that are

versatile and flexible, robust and ambiguous
enough to allow this kinetic quality of the
city to flourish. Perhaps the Kinetic City
might be the tactical approach to take when
dealing with the urbanism of the temporary,
of high densities and intensities? In spite
of these many potential disjunctures, what
this reading of the city does celebrate is
the dynamic and pluralist processes that
make the urban Indian landscape. Within
this urbanism, the Static and Kinetic
cities necessarily coexist and blur into an
integral entity, even if momentarily, to
create the margins for adjustment that their
simultaneous existences demand.
This article is based on an essay entitled Negotiating the
Static and Kinetic Cities published in A. Huyssen, ed., Urban
Imaginaries, Durham, NC, 2007.

1
2

See A. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture,

Social Power and Environment, London, 1976.
This unprecedented shift in demography has not only
transformed the social make-up of Indian cities, but has
perpetuated an incomprehensible landscape charged with
intense dualities, which are cultural, social and economic.
This new demography consist mainly of rural migrants,
who form the urban poor and bring with them new
skills, social values and cultural attitudes that not
only determine their ability to survive in an urban
environment, but are in the process also altering the very
structure of the city. The presence of the urban poor
makes another crucial divide explicit between those
that have access to the formal city and the infrastructure

that goes with it, and those that dont and therefore lack
the basic amenities.
3 See also P. Shetty, Stories of Entrepreneurship, New Delhi,
2005.
4 See P. Chaterjee, Are Indians becoming bourgeois at
last?, in Body. City. Siting contemporary culture in India,
Berlin, 2003.
5 The idea that distinct manufacturing zones and
spatial segregation have now shifted to services and
manufacturing occurring in fragmented areas in the city
networked through the efficient transportation system the
city offers.
6 See R. Sundaram, Recycling Modernity: Pirate electronic
cultures in Inida, in Sarai Reader: The Cities of Everyday
Life, New Delhi, 2001.
7 Chaterjee, op. cit.
8 Weddings are an example of how the rich too are
engaged in the making of the Kinetic City. The lack
of formal spaces for weddings as the cultural outlet
for ostentation have resulted in public open space being
colonized temporarily as spaces for the spectacle of
elaborate weddings. Often very complex wedding sets
are constructed and removed within twelve hours.
Again the margins of the urban system are momentarily
expanded.
9 For examples of works / projects that have attempted
to translate these ideas, see R. Mehrotra, Planning for
Conservation Looking at Bombays Historic Fort Area,
Future Anterior, Journal of Historic Preservation,
History, theory and Criticism, Vol.1, No. 2, 2004.
11 See V. Venkatraman and S. Mirto, Network/Design, in
Domus, No. 887, 2005.
12 See R. Khosla, The Loneliness of a Long Distant Future
Dilemmas of Contemporary Architecture, New Delhi,
2002.

Rahul Mehrotra is Professor of

Urban Design and Planning and
Chair of the Department of Urban
Planning and Design, Harvard
Graduate School of Design.

BUSES: NOT SEXY

BUT THE ONLY
SOLUTION
As Rio marks a massive
investment in Bus Rapid
Transit systems, Enrique
Pealosa explains how
mobility and equity are
closely connected.
Urban mobility is perceived by developing
country cities leaders as their most pressing
and difficult challenge. Citizens spend
hours in traffic. Seeking to overcome it,
powerful and wealthy citizens create odious
symbols of inequality, such as the exclusive
road lanes for high-level bureaucrats in
Moscow, or the private helicopters over
So Paulo. Inequality is indeed the main
obstacle to effective mobility solutions, as
I will propose here.
Mobility is peculiar: different from
other challenges such as education or
housing, it tends to get worse as societies
become richer. It is particular as well,
in that solutions are largely counterintuitive: as it seems to us the Sun circles
around the Earth, it seems that more road
infrastructure will solve traffic jams. And,
of course, both perceptions are equally
flawed.
Population growth, and all that comes
with a higher income per capita, such as
smaller households, larger living spaces per
person, and an increase in the percentage
of non-residential buildings, will make
Latin American cities double or treble their

built-up area over the next 50 years. It will

make most Asian cities grow more than
1,000 per cent and African ones more than
that, albeit over a longer period. How will
mobility be solved in these giant cities?
BRT: not just a cheaper
alternative
Clearly it will not be car based; public
transport is the only option. But, which
public transport? In the age of maglev
high-speed trains, rail appears to be
the obvious, modern solution. Rail
manufacturers enormous marketing and
public relations budgets and sometimes
that is a euphemism often counting on
their embassies support reinforce this
view. However, the only possible means
to provide mass public transport to all
inhabitants of a developing country city
are bus-based systems. While So Paulo
recent underground lines have cost US$250
(R$560) million per kilometre, Rio is
constructing Bus Rapid Transport (BRT)
lines for less than US$10 (R$22) million per
kilometre. Operational costs are also lower
for BRTs than for rail systems.
The advantages of bus over rail are not
just a matter of cost. While underground
systems have some advantages over
BRT, the opposite is true as well. In
terms of capacity BRT is very similar
to an underground system: Bogots
TransMilenio moves up to 47,000
19

THE NATURAL AND THE ARTIFICIAL

Topography defines the conditions of

everyday life in Rio de Janeiro where built
form adheres and invades the natural
landscape

20

passengers/hour/direction (PHD), which is

more than all of the worlds underground
lines, except for a handful. And there
are many known ways to optimise and
increase TransMilenios speed and capacity,
which have not yet been implemented.
Guangzhous BRT moves up to 37,000 PHD,
more than all Chinese underground lines,
except for Beijings line number 2.
Speed-wise express BRT lines are
similar to an underground on roads
without traffic lights; and it does not cost
much to construct underpasses for BRT
at intersections. It is usually easy to add
a passing lane at stations, in order to have
express routes with buses stopping only
every several stations. Undergrounds
cannot have express routes unless a second
parallel line is built. More importantly,
BRT journey times can be shorter for
several reasons. When changing lines,
underground passengers have to alight,
walk hundreds of metres and wait for
another train; BRT buses can change
lines without wasting time getting off
and walking to the other line. In order
to carry any given amount of passengers,
many more buses than trains are required.
Therefore, BRT frequency is much higher,
particularly at off-peak hours. This means,
unpleasant waiting time at the station
is shorter.
Underground stations need to be at
least one kilometre apart from each other
for efficiencys sake; BRT stations can be
efficiently located 500 metres apart. This
means walking time from the origin of
the trip to the station and from station to
destination is shorter. Some BRT systems,
such as Guangzhous, operate buses in
ordinary mixed-traffic streets and the BRT
trunk-way in the same route; which means
buses can collect passengers close to their
trips origin and leave them close to their
destinations.
Public transport users are exemplary
citizens who contribute to reduce
congestion. They should be rewarded
with low-cost, high-quality travel. Why
send them underground? It is much more
pleasant to travel on the surface, enjoying
natural sunlight and views of the city. It is
also preferable not to spend time in long
underground corridors and stairways,
which, even when they are mechanical,
often break down.
If buses are so wonderful,
why werent they preferred in
London?
If buses are so wonderful, why werent they
preferred in London, Paris or New York?
Why arent they preferred in developing
country cities? Before getting into that, lets
be clear that my position is that all public
transport is good and undergrounds are
formidable, wonderful systems. The issue is
what to do when the mobility challenge is
vast and the resources to tackle it are scarce.
At any rate, what should be done first?
When the first undergrounds were
built, in the late 1880s, buses did not
exist. As Dinesh Mohan points out, into
the first decades of the twentieth century
streets were still cobblestoned, like they
were during Roman times.1 A ride on solid
rubber wheels would have been rough.
And the technology for pneumatic tires,
which could support heavy vehicles, only
appeared in the 1930s. Therefore, buses only
fully entered the scene around 1940. Then
they were the new thing, sexier than trams,
which they replaced all over the world in a
couple of decades. But of course, by then,
what was truly sexy was the private car.
Another reason for underground systems

was that historic centres of cities, such as

Paris or London, had narrow, winding
streets. The only way to move fast across
them was by underground.
Developing country cities are different.
They usually have large arterial roads. And
they do not have a unique, well-defined
centre. They have many centralities, the
importance of which is ever-changing, often
waning. They are well suited for BRT. But
they have middle-class and high-income
citizens whose political priority is to obtain
more and more road space for their cars.
They do not want to give up an inch of road
space, existing or newly built, to buses.
At the top of their demands to government
are more road infrastructure and
undergrounds. In very unequal developing
country societies, higher-income citizens
rarely have the intention of using the
undergrounds they demand. They only see
them as a means to reduce traffic by putting
others underground, namely, bus riders.
In more advanced developing countries,
high car-ownership levels hide the fact that
many households own a car, but cannot
drive to work: relatively few in an office
building have access to parking. The fact
is that a large majority of those who drive
to work in developing country cities have a
higher income than most public transport
users. Giving in to the pressures of the
powerful society members who drive to
work is what governments tend to do.
It is politically easy to spend billions on
undergrounds and other rail systems, which
do not take space away from cars. However,
it is neither the best technical, nor the most
democratic option.
If there are alternatives, it is not
technically correct to prioritise a system
that will only solve mobility for a small
minority of a citys population, leaving the
majority stranded. Not even the largest
underground and suburban rail networks
in developing country cities reach 15 per
cent of their populations; in fact most
undergrounds in those cities move less
than 5 per cent of their population. Such
is the case with Rios two underground lines
whose share in the citys daily trips is only
1.78 per cent. Building one underground
line is expensive, and the cost per passenger
increases with each additional line, as
they are prioritised by demand: each
additional line costs the same per
kilometre, but moves progressively less
passengers per kilometre.
Suburban rail?
Most developing country cities have
relatively unused, often abandoned,
rail lines that are said to offer a great
opportunity for the operation of urban and
suburban passenger rail service. Suburban
rail differs from undergrounds in that it
has lower acceleration and longer distances
between stations, and train carriages are
designed for mostly seated passengers.
While suburban rail investment costs can
be low, operational costs per passenger are
high. When an overground urban rail line
is in service, it has to be fenced off, creating
an inconvenient barrier through urban
areas, which also tend to deteriorate and
lower the values of surrounding areas, and
sometimes even foster crime. Negotiating
road intersections can be complex and
expensive for overground urban rail. In
fact, when such urban rail corridors exist,
BRT works better than rail. High-capacity
BRT systems have a much higher PHD than
any suburban rail line; buses can come in
and out of the rail/BRT trunk-way. And
it is much simpler to solve the issue of
intersections with the road network with

bus underpasses, or even traffic lights.

As for light rail or tram systems: they
are pretty and usually more stable than
buses, but they costs more, have lower
capacities and are operationally less flexible.
Before investing in rail, it seems logical
to first use the existing road infrastructure
to accommodate public transport. It does
not take an MIT PhD; a committee of
12-year-olds would also conclude within
half an hour that the best way to use scarce
road space is with exclusive lanes for buses.
An exclusive BRT lane may move up to 70
times more passengers than a lane used by
cars. To clarify the issue, lets imagine that
a catastrophe leaves us with enough fuel for
only 5 per cent of vehicles in a city: to whom
would we allocate it? For survival, we would
necessarily allocate it to trucks and buses.
Now, if what is scarce is not fuel, but rather
road space? Shouldnt we do likewise?
History shows how societies accustomed
to flagrant injustices do not perceive
anything wrong with them. That was the
case with everything the French Revolution
changed, before it happened. In the United
States women could not vote for President
less than 100 years ago, and African
Americans had to give up their seats to
white citizens in a bus until the middle
of the twentieth century, and good,
ordinary people and great thinkers
saw nothing wrong with it. Now, a bus
slowed down by traffic is as flagrantly
undemocratic as women not being able
to vote. If all citizens are equal before the
Law, as all Constitutions state in their first
article, a bus with 100 passengers has a 100
times more right to road space than a car
with one.
Road space, the space between
buildings, is probably the most valuable
physical asset of a city. How should we
distribute it between pedestrians, cyclists,
public transport and cars? Regardless of
what is done, it should be clear it is neither
a technical issue, nor a legal one: it is a
political issue.
A different solution, a different
way of thinking
Implementing solutions to this political
issue requires first a different way of

thinking; a democratic way of thinking that

truly assumes all citizens are equal and
have the same right to public assets such as
road space.
New technologies such as maglev should
make rail systems faster and less costly. Bus
systems will benefit from new technologies
too. Driverless cars are anticipated in a few
years; but driverless buses, operating on
established routes, exclusive lanes in the
case of BRTs, are simpler to implement and
should arrive sooner. Advances in battery
technologies should also make electrical
buses more efficient and less costly.
New urban design can accommodate
buses in creative ways: hundreds of
thousands of hectares of new cities to
be built in the developing world over
the next few decades could incorporate
thousands of kilometres of bus-only roads
along greenways, which would constitute
formidable, low-cost, high-quality, public
transport systems.
Lets imagine a city in which clean,
well-lit, safe buses, operating on exclusive
lanes anywhere where there is traffic, with
underpasses to avoid traffic lights, are
found everywhere at all times. Above all,
public transport trip times in such a bus
system would be much shorter than those
by private car, which would be discouraged
not just by longer travel times, but also by a
gamut of parking restrictions. Such
a public transport system would achieve
that most difficult challenge in a developing
country city: get higher income citizens to
use it alongside their fellow citizens. Most
importantly, such a system is economically
possible for any city. As a symbol, the sight
of a bus moving swiftly along a bus-only
lane as expensive cars stand still in traffic
is a picture of democracy in action.
1

Dinesh Mohan, Mythologies, Metros & Future Urban

Transport, Indian Institute of Technology, TRIPP Report
Series, 2008.

Enrique Pealosa is President,

Institute for Transportation &
Development Policy and was
Mayor of Bogot from 1998 to
2001 where he introduced the
TransMilenio bus system.

CITIES AS AN
ACT OF WILL
Andy Altman offers a
detailed account on how
legacy-first and design-led
planning was implemented
in London for and after the
2012 Games.
Cities are an act of will wrote Edmund
Bacon, the acclaimed city planner from
Philadelphia, in Design of Cities (1976).
But whether the building of cities is an act
of great imagination or brutal disregard
depends on a complex interplay of forces
political, ideological, social, economic,
environmental.
As an act of twenty-first-century city
building, the 2012 Olympic Games in

London created one of the largest urban

regeneration projects in Europe, and to
my mind one of the most imaginative.
It offers a unique lens to take stock of the
craft of city building. Many may be inclined
to dismiss the London Olympics as being
an exceptional event that holds few lessons
for cities other than those wealthy enough
to bid for hosting the Olympics. This
would be a mistake. While mega-events
are massively capitalised, singular events,
it is precisely these unique circumstances
of urban transformation on a grand scale
and at hyper speed that allow us to observe
the dynamic of city-building that would
otherwise take decades to realise. How
London used the Olympics to further its
21

ambition for urban growth, and organised

public and private resources and roles,
institutional structures, masterplanning
and design processes to align vision and
action has applicability to a broad range
of urban intervention as these are the
ingredients, in one form or another, of
urban transformation.
In the current epoch of cities, during
which hundreds of new, large-scale citybuilding enterprises will be required to
absorb exploding rural-urban migration
and population growth, our understanding
of the city-building craft is an urgent
matter. How we build cities not only has an
immediate impact on the lives of millions
of people who are and will become city
dwellers, but the morphological legacy
and settlement patterns that will be
imprinted in the coming decades will have
a profound effect on the ability of future
generations to meet the challenge of global
sustainability and resilience. The space
between where ideas for city building
are generated and their implementation
through political, planning, financial,
regulatory and institutional structures is
often where there is a disjuncture between
theory and practice, between urban visions
and political realities, between what is
planned versus what is actually built. It in
this context that the London 2012 Games
become instructive.
London 2012: an aspiration for
city building
Despite some vociferous critics, the London
2012 Olympics have been acclaimed as a
successful four-week celebration of sport,
a spectacular show and a shining moment
of British pride. But the more profound,
lasting impact will be their role in shifting
the trajectory of Londons growth. The
regeneration of a 600-acre (243-hectare)
brownfield site will join the history of
Londons totemic moments of city-building
where its pattern of growth was irrevocably
transformed. The Olympics have been
focused in East London, one of the
historically most deprived areas of the city
where surveys of urban distress from the
late-nineteenth century the famous Booth
Poverty Maps of 189899 are largely
unchanged a century later; an area of the
city that has suffered the familiar saga of
urban deterioration resulting from deindustrialisation, concentrated poverty, and
the destruction of the urban fabric through
the de-urbanising forces of urban renewal.
Against this backdrop, the 2012
Olympics were merely an actor albeit
a transformative one in a larger urban
narrative the origins of which lie in the last
four decades of vision, policy, and tenacity
to reverse this declining condition. Through
the vicissitudes of markets, politics and
changing ideas of urban planning and good
urban form there has been a determination
that for London to successfully grow
it must move East. With vast areas of
lower-value land sitting only minutes from
central London, its potential cried out
to be unlocked through the building of
infrastructure and the assembly of land.
The term legacy, often posited as
a post-hoc rationalisation to justify
massive investment in sports facilities and
infrastructure, was just the opposite in
Londons case. Here, the Olympics were the
tangible manifestation of a clear vision for
urban transformation in search of a means
to be realised. Vision, politics, urban ideas,
economic realities and the land constraints
of a global city colluded to produce the
Olympic Park in East London.
While not a scientific accounting,
22

a cartoon version tracing key moments in

the lineage of the Olympic Park might go
something like this:
The 1947 Town and Country Act and the
Abercrombie Plan established a
Green Belt that circumscribed Londons
expansion, forcing inward regeneration
when London grows;
The development of the Docklands and
Canary Wharf throughout the 1980s and
1990s, re-positioned obsolete East London
waterfront lands as a new financial centre
to secure Londons competitive economic
position in Europe and globally;
The Urban Task Force, a government
study chaired by Lord Richard Rogers in
the late 1990s, which advocated for
compact urban form, building on
brownfield land near good public
transport hubs and the value of urban
regeneration, especially along the river
Thames;
The election of Ken Livingstone
in 2000 as the first elected Mayor of
London represented the beginning of
a devolution of power to London that
has been strengthened during the
mayoralty of current Mayor Boris
Johnson. Both supported the regeneration
of East London as their highest priority
for urban reinvestment, representing
a critical continuity of vision and
commitment.
The development and consent for the
Stratford Master Plan, spearheaded by
visionary developers Stuart Lipton and
Nigel Hugill in 2004, before the bid was
even won, signalled the potential of this
part of East London for major investment
from the private and public sector, an area
ripe for regeneration.
The salient point is that the decision to
build Londons Olympic Park in the East
London community of Stratford was taken
in the larger context of Londons plan for
growth and was a deliberate strategy to
rebuild the fabric of a city that had been
ruptured. Building a new, compact piece of
urbanism on a brownfield site connected
to a dense network of upgraded transport
infrastructure, with the ambition to
integrate it physically, economically and
socially with the adjacent communities may
seem obvious, but that is not the case in too
many new cities that are being built and
rebuilt in the rapidly urbanising world.
How was it achieved?
When London was awarded the Olympics
in 2015, among the first priorities was to
acquire the 600-acre (243-hectare) future
site of the Olympic Park. At the time it
was largely blighted industrial and derelict
land, some of which had in fact been used
as the dumping ground for debris from
the devastation East London suffered from
bombings in World War II. Sitting on top of
a dense transport network, the regeneration
potential of the area was stymied by the
hundreds of disparate freehold interests
that needed to be assembled to unlock the
latent opportunity. The Olympics provided
the political will and capital to undertake
the task that had previously been seen as
too difficult.
Concomitant with organising the land
was the need to establish the institutional
architecture to deliver the Olympic Park,
both for Games and for their legacy. This
seemingly mundane matter would be the
unsung hero of the success of the Olympics.
The alignment of national, metropolitan
(mayoral) and local political interests,
and the creation of well-designed, focused

delivery structures, was critical to get right

from the outset of the project. And there
was no time to waste with an immovable
deadline looming large for the opening
ceremony of the Olympics. Multiple central
government ministries, national sports
bodies, the Mayor of London, the four
local host boroughs that owned land or
were adjacent to the Olympic Park, and the
diverse communities of East London all
had to be engaged and, most dauntingly,
aligned.
While a vast network of governance and
consultation structures were established
to coordinate the Olympics enterprise
from the highest level Cabinet Committee
chaired by the Prime Minister to local
community organisations throughout East
London three principal delivery vehicles
were created to deliver the Games:
The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA):
the infrastructure company focused
on the building of the Park and off-site
venues. A time-limited organisation with
a board of private and public
representatives which received the bulk
of public funding from central
government and the mayor to deliver the
facilities for the Games;
The London Organising Committee of
the Olympic and Paralympic Games
(LOCOG): the organisation charged
with staging the Olympic events, securing
sponsors and liaising with the
International Olympic Committee (IOC)
and other national and international
sports bodies;
The Olympic Park Legacy Company
(OPLC), later renamed the London
Legacy Development Corporation
(LLDC): master developer and landowner
of the Olympic Park, focused on the postGames transformation from event mode
to regeneration and attracting investment
in the land and venues.
The creation of the OPLC in 2009 (of which
the author was its first Chief Executive,
eds.) fully three years before the Games,
was novel for an Olympic host city and
testament to the core regeneration purpose
of the Olympics investment. A company
jointly owned by the Mayor of London and
the national government, and including
the representation on its board of the two
principal boroughs owning land in the
Park the London boroughs of Hackney
and Newham this unique creation was
designed to reflect the delicate balancing
of interests and power that needed to be
aligned to deliver successful regeneration.
This division of labour among the
three entities did not of course recuse the
other delivery entities from incorporating
legacy considerations into the core of their
programme, as this mission was embodied
in the ethos of the Olympics enterprise
in London. However, the OPLC, with a
singular focus on the post-Games agenda
of city building was critical to setting and
overseeing that vision and ensuring that
actions were taken to deliver physical, social
and economic regeneration of the Olympic
Park, spreading its benefits to surrounding
communities. In this way, there could
be as seamless as possible integration
between the Games and post-Games use of
infrastructure, land, buildings and venues.
Crucial to the city-building task
was the development of the masterplan
that would establish the framework for the
GB6 billion government infrastructure
investment to be expended on the site.
And key to this were three integrated
but distinct phases: the Games Plan, the

Transformation Plan (for the transition

from Games upon completion) and the
Legacy Communities Plan (the long-term
plan for the build-out of the site). The
strength of Londons approach was to
conceive these three plans in exact opposite
chronology; that is, planning for the site
started from the long view of a vision for
the future city and then worked back to the
requirements of the Games. The starting
point was the vision for the future. And this
basic premise has profound ramifications
for all that was to be planned and built, the
main features of which included:
The creation of a central park of over
200 acres (81 hectares) along the River
Lea (following the removal of electricity
pylons) that formed the central spine of
the site and created the armature around
which five future neighbourhoods would
be built, very much in keeping with
London precedents for the integration
of urban parks and built-up areas, such as
Victoria Park and Regents Park;
The building of only those venues that
were needed on a permanent basis
and would have future uses and
constituencies, all other venues would be
interim facilities that would be removed
to create the sites for the future mixeduse area with homes, schools, shops and
places of work;
Dispersing the venues throughout the site
in strategic locations rather than
clustering all the facilities in the usual
sports zone. In this way the sports
venues could become anchors of activity
and physical icons integrated with the
new neighbourhoods;
The Olympic Athletes Village, which
during Games would host 17,000
athletes, staff and residents, was built to
be transformed into the first complete
post-Games complex of 3,000 units of
housing;
GB1 billion invested in upgrading
existing rail and bus lines serving
the site, including the building of a
new international transport centre to
accommodate future connections to
Europe and immediate connections to
Londons major transport hub of Kings
Cross, which makes central London only
a five-minute ride and one-stop away;
A central energy centre was built with
sufficient capacity to service the entire site
in legacy as well as having the potential to
export energy to surrounding
communities;
An underground network of new sewers,
utilities, and telecommunications ducts
was built to accommodate future capacity
needs.
These basic and interrelated building blocks
of the masterplan, and the investment it
guided, resulted in about 75 per cent of
the total Olympics budget being spent
to create a platform for the future city.
While distinctive buildings were certainly
constructed, such as Zaha Hadids Aquatics
Centre and Hopkins Architects Velodrome,
the main focus of investment was putting
in place the prerequisites of a new piece of
London.
And this intensity of focus on legacy
did not end with the Games: institutions,
funding, commercial transactions and
community partnerships were established
to ensure a smooth transition from an
Olympic Park for Games to its post-Games
urban life. Importantly, both commercially
and symbolically, all of the permanent
sports venues have secured future uses,
thus removing the fear of white elephants

that had plagued so many mega-event cities

and stymied their future development by
standing vacant. The unfolding transition
also included:
A masterplan and design guidelines
that establish the framework (adopted
and approved by the planning authority)
for the future development of 8,000 new
homes and creating certainty required for
private sector investment and community
confidence;
An additional GB500 million of funding
from central government was dedicated
to the post-Games transformation of the
Park to retrofit venues, prepare sites and
build open spaces and amenities;
The Athletes Villages 3,000 units were
sold for a mixed-income community, half
for affordable housing and half to a
private developer for what is now being
marketed as Londons newest cool
residential neighbourhood, East Village;
The International Broadcast Centre
(IBC) and Media Centre, two buildings
that together comprise over 100,000
square metres of space and the length
of 7 jumbo jets, are being transformed
into a new technology hub iCity to
house British Telecommunications sports
studios, a research and teaching centre for
Loughborough University, a data centre
and an accelerator space for start-ups.
To oversee and manage this complex
interweaving of city-building activities,
and the choreography of public and
private investment and actions that need
to be carefully staged, the OPLC was reengineered and given powers to ensure
that the integration of planning and
implementation, that proved so essential
in the success of the delivery of the Games,
was carried through in legacy.
Through national legislation enabling
the mayor to create local development
corporations, very much a modern version
of the government development corporation
in the 1970s that spearheaded the first
generation of East Londons transformation
in the Docklands, OPLC was reconstituted
as the London Legacy Development
Corporation (LLDC) under the Mayor of
Londons control. It was given not only
ownership of the Olympic Park land, but
also the planning authority for the Olympic
Park and surrounding neighbourhoods
under the jurisdiction of local boroughs.
This exceptional consolidation of
land ownership and planning power,
unthinkable in most Western cities too
timid to assert such power since the mass
urban renewal of the post-World War II
era, was agreed to by all levels of national
and local government with a common
purpose to maintain the regeneration
momentum fuelled by the Games. What
will be surprising to observers of urban
development is that there was virtually no
community opposition to the creation of
the LLDC and its extraordinary powers.
The Convergence Agenda
London is spatially and socio-economically
unequal: it has an affluent West and a more
deprived East. Life expectancy drops from
80 years to 73 years as you move eastwards
across the city. This dramatic statistic
captures the disparity in many social and
economic indicators between East London
and the rest of the city. The Olympic host
boroughs have historically been among the
worse off in England. To counteract this
grim reality and leverage investment for the
Games, local mayors developed the concept
of convergence as they key driver for change

amongst their communities. Convergence

establishes an aspiration that East
Londoners life chances and opportunities
should, at a minimum, be on a par with the
average of all of London. Far from being
modest, this simple aspiration established
bold and comprehensive goals in improving
employment, health, education, housing
conditions and all the indices of life chances
and circumstances that would help ensure
that the conditions documented by Booths
Survey a century ago were ameliorated
beyond the artificial confines of the Park.
And, importantly, it recognised that for
genuine regeneration to occur beyond the
traditional bricks and mortar of the Park,
there had to be a more comprehensive
programme of investment and change.
Translating the Convergence Policy to
the Olympic Park was as much of a mindset
as it was a legislative matter. Every piece of
the building of a new piece of city needed
to be understood as an asset through which
mixture and diversity are promoted. Too
often this perspective is compartmentalised
as a separate programme, as opposed
to being a core part of everything that
is delivered. To address this, the OPLC
adopted an inter-related set of policies to
promote convergence, such as:
Requiring affordable housing (35 per cent
of all new housing built on the Park);
Proactively creating local employment
and small business opportunities
generated by the venues, such as the
Aquatics Centre, so that they are operated
by small business enterprises;
Setting affordable rates for the sports
venues for local residents so that the
poorest of residents could swim in worldclass facilities or attend a football game in
the Olympic Stadium;
Using the International Press, Media
Broadcast Centre facilities as a resource
to diversify the economy of East London
by actively creating a technology hub and
connecting this to local community
colleges and training for opportunities in
the new economy;
Creating community programming for
future activities in the Olympic Park so
that the Park would be first and foremost
a park enjoyed by local communities, and
not solely for tourists;
Working with Westfield, the largest
urban shopping centre operator in
Europe, to support of a retail academy to
train local residents for service jobs,
which has resulted in the majority of
positions being filled locally;
Constructing bridges to connect the
Park over canals, roads and railways that
divide the site from adjacent communities.

sound too perfect in attempting to rectify

that divide and create the platform to
connect imagination with the fine grain
of urban form. Time will be the ultimate
judge as to whether the foundation will
work. Affordable housing and employment
policies to ensure diversity could be
eroded; design guidelines intended to
ensure diversity in the built environment
could be discarded at the behest of capital;
land could be sold too quickly, in too
large swathes for revenue which would
obstruct a more diverse city created by
many hands over time; the institutions
created to steward this precious asset could
be prevented from taking the longer view.
And, of course, we will look back at todays
statistics of the fortunes of East London
to measure whether they have genuinely
converged or deprivation has simply been
pushed further out of sight.
For Rio de Janeiro, as it is mobilises to
deliver its legacy of the 2016 Games, the
questions of how the investments will lead
to greater integration or further segregation
of the city are paramount. Will Porto
Maravilha evolve to reflect the dynamism of
Rios urbanism, its lively streets, mix of uses
and pedestrian-oriented street culture, and
not simply become a platform for capital?
Will the new, important investments in
transport help to heal the North-South
divide or serve to further greater sprawl?
Will the recent investment in the favelas
lead not only to improved conditions but
greater economic and social integration
with the dynamics of Rios growth?
Hopefully, Londons recent experience
offers insights for debate.
Andy Altman is Visiting Senior
Fellow at LSE Cities, London
School of Economics and
Political Science. He was Chief
Executive of the London Legacy
Development Corporation,
2009-2012.

Ultimately, the London Legacy

Corporation has significantly been able
to extend its remit beyond the Olympic
Park itself, to ensure the integration of the
Park with surrounding communities. On
reflection, the role of the agency has been
to bridge between vision and action, ideas
and institutions, and the integration of the
physical, social and economic aspects of
diversity and mixture essential to realise
successful urbanism. In this case, without
the Convergence Agenda the Park could
easily become an elite island unto itself,
rather than part of an integrated whole: a
new piece of London.
What does this mean for Rio 2016?
Imaginative city building, and the
marshalling of forces necessary to achieve
it, is a complex task that too often occurs
in silos. The London Olympics story may
23

DATA
The information on the following pages summarises research
undertaken by LSE Cities over the past year. It places Rio de Janeiro
in a comparative context with other Urban Age cities, including New
York, London, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Johannesburg, Mexico City and
So Paulo. The section illustrates the unequal distribution of global
urban growth and tracks the speed at which selected world cities are
changing and growing. It provides a unique comparative database
of twelve cities including urban size and growth rates, inequality
and murder rates, water consumption and CO2 emissions. Finally,
it identifies the sharp contrasts between residential and employment
densities and the varying patterns of mobility and distribution of
public transport infrastructure, which are key determinants of social,
economic and environmental sustainability.

RESEARCH TEAM
Savvas Verdis
Duncan Smith
Adam Towle
Catarina Heeckt
mer avuolu
Danielle Hoppe
We would like to especially thank the following
organisations for their help in accessing key data
that are displayed in the following pages.
Barcelona City Council
Bogot Secretariat of Planning
Geoprocessamento - Port Region Urban Development
Company (CDURP), Rio de Janeiro
HafenCity Hamburg GmbH
Institute for Transport and Development Policy, Rio de Janeiro
Instituto Pereira Passos, Rio de Janeiro
MPU Architects, Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro Municipal Olympic Company
Rio de Janeiro Municipal Transportation Department
State of Rio de Janeiro Public Works Company

For full references to data sources, please see: http://rio2013.lsecities.net/newspaper/

24

DYNAMICS OF URBANISATION
WHERE CITIES ARE GROWING

London
8.9 Hamburg
1.8
Paris
10.5

Chicago
9.5

Vancouver
2.2

Moscow
11.5

New York City

20.1

Beijing
15.0

Barcelona
5.5

Los Angeles
13.2

Istanbul
11.0
Tehran
7.2

Cairo
11.0

Kabul
3.1
Delhi
21.9

Urumqi
5.1

Dhaka
14.9

Bogot
8.5

Lagos
10.8

Nairobi
3.2
Dar es Salaam
3.4

Kinshasa
8.4
Lima
9.0
So Paulo
19.6

Rio de
Janeiro
11.9

Shanghai
19.6
Hong Kong
7.1
Manila
11.7
Ho Chi
Minh City
6.2
Singapore
5.1

Karachi
13.5
Mumbai
19.4
Addis Ababa
2.9

Mexico City
20.1

Tokyo
36.9

Jakarta
9.6

Johannesburg
3.8
Sydney
4.5

Buenos Aires
13.4

1.1

Metropolitan population
in millions (2010)

1950
1990
Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2012). World Urbanization Prospects : The 2011 Revision.

2025

HOW CITIES ARE GROWING

City

Country

Nairobi
Lagos
Kinshasha
Kabul
Addis Ababa
Ho Chi Minh City
Dhaka
Beijing
Delhi
Karachi
Shanghai
Manila
Mumbai
Istanbul
Bogot
Cairo
Jakarta
Johannesburg
Mexico City
Chicago
Barcelona
Los Angeles
So Paulo
New York
Hong Kong
London
Rio de Janeiro
Hamburg
Berlin
Tokyo

Kenya
Nigeria
Congo, DRC
Afghanistan
Ethiopia
Vietnam
Bangladesh
China
India
Pakistan
China
Philippines
India
Turkey
Colombia
Egypt
Indonesia
South Africa
Mexico
USA
Spain
USA
Brazil
USA
China
United Kingdom
Brazil
Germany
Germany
Japan

Projected annual
population growth
2010-2025
(%)
(Total)

6.0%
5.0%
4.8%
4.5%
4.1%
3.8%
3.6%
3.4%
3.3%
3.3%
3.0%
2.6%
2.4%
2.4%
2.2%
2.2%
2.2%
1.7%
1.5%
1.3%
1.2%
1.2%
1.2%
1.1%
1.0%
1.0%
1.0%
0.6%
0.4%
0.3%

193,752
537,890
408,002
138,261
119,103
233,940
531,780
508,880
733,325
446,040
589,989
308,262
475,659
262,923
191,113
247,253
212,796
64,625
295,907
125,943
68,181
164,263
235,025
231,188
73,817
88,817
116,937
10,268
14,576
115,241

Annual population
growth
1995-2010
(%)
(Total)

5.6%
5.4%
5.8%
5.9%
2.4%
4.6%
5.3%
5.4%
5.1%
4.0%
5.8%
1.6%
2.4%
2.9%
3.7%
0.9%
1.0%
4.4%
1.3%
1.5%
1.7%
1.1%
1.5%
1.2%
1.0%
0.9%
1.1%
0.3%
0.0%
0.7%

98,744
320,375
261,502
95,756
51,626
168,773
439,812
446,293
635,185
335,484
606,968
150,170
340,809
219,170
200,570
88,325
87,205
99,865
222,107
113,732
73,033
125,609
246,761
210,773
60,592
67,673
112,849
5,306
-1,421
223,080

* Pricewaterhouse Coopers projection using UN urban agglomeration definitions and population estimates.
Data published in 2009 and may not fully reflect the impact of the global economic recession on GDP growth trends.

Metro
population
2010

3,236,589
10,788,300
8,415,198
3,052,000
2,918,669
6,189,423
14,929,647
14,999,554
21,935,142
13,499,702
19,554,059
11,653,810
19,421,983
10,952,950
8,502,405
11,031,494
9,629,953
3,763,095
20,142,334
9,544,691
5,487,878
13,223,023
19,649,366
20,104,369
7,053,189
8,923,000
11,867,236
1,786,468
3,450,076
36,932,780

Projected
average
annual real
GPD
growth
2008-2025*

6.4%
6.4%
6.3%
6.5%
6.8%
7.0%
6.2%
6.7%
6.4%
5.5%
6.6%
4.7%
6.3%
4.2%
3.9%
5.0%
5.5%
3.5%
3.9%
2.2%
2.0%
1.6%
4.2%
1.8%
2.7%
2.2%
4.2%
1.3%
1.3%
1.7%

National
median
age
2010

18.5
17.9
17.1
15.6
17.5
28.5
24.0
34.6
25.5
21.6
34.6
22.3
25.5
28.3
26.8
24.4
26.9
25.2
25.9
37.1
40.2
37.1
29.0
37.1
41.1
39.8
29.0
44.3
44.3
44.9

Projected
national
median
age
2025

20.5
18.1
18.7
20.8
21.4
35.7
29.7
39.6
29.9
26.4
39.6
25.7
29.9
33.9
31.7
28.0
31.0
28.4
31.5
38.9
46.7
38.9
35.3
38.9
47.2
41.6
35.3
48.4
48.4
50.2

There are dramatic regional differences in the pace and

scale of urban transformations at the global level. The map
above charts the size and growth of a selection of world
cities with more than a million people from 1950 to 2025.
Some of the cities predicted to be among the largest in
the world in 2025 were no more than villages and small
towns in 1950, while others are barely growing anymore.
The acceleration of growth in African and Asian cities and
the relative slow-down of urbanisation in Latin America
becomes even more evident in the table to the left, which
compares a range of past and future growth patterns for a
selection of thirty cities.

25

HOW CITIES PERFORM

Behind the statistics of global city growth lie very different
patterns of urbanisation, with diverse spatial, social and
economic characteristics that dramatically affect the urban
experience. In addition to standard measures of population
growth and the economy, LSE Cities has assembled spatial,
social, transport and environmental data from a range of official
sources, providing an overview of how twelve selected cities
compare to each other on a set of key performance indicators.
The graphic overview of these results highlights some
striking differences, especially when it comes to these cities
speed of growth. While Mexico City, Istanbul, So Paulo
and New York are growing by more than 200,000 people a
year, it is Mumbai that is changing the fastest of the twelve,
adding 54 additional residents every hour. In comparison,
Hamburg will only gain 1 person per hour, Hong Kong 8,
London 10 and Rio de Janeiro 13. Patterns of habitation
also differ significantly. While London and New York have
similar population sizes, New York has twice as many

Measurement years and methodologies used to

calculate indicator values may differ between
cities and data are not always comparable.
For full references to data sources, please see:
http://rio2013.lsecities.net/newspaper/.

RIO DE JANEIRO
NEW YORK
LONDON
MEXICO CITY
JOHANNESBURG
MUMBAI
SO PAULO
ISTANBUL
HONG KONG
BARCELONA
BOGOT
HAMBURG
26

Current
population in
the city
(millions)

people per km2, a density level that is dwarfed by Mumbai,

where peak densities reach well over 120,000 people per
km2. Mumbai also leads on economic growth, having
experienced an average annual increase in GVA of 6.7 per
cent between 1993 and 2010, even though it is now slowing
down. Over the same period, the economies of Johannesburg
and Bogot grew at about half that speed nevertheless
impressive compared to the relatively slow growth for the
European cities in this table. Looking at GVA per capita,
New York (US$51,337/R$114,728) and London (US$47,313/
R$105,735) top the list, followed by Hamburg (US$42,270/
R$94,465) and Hong Kong (US$31,340R$70,038). People
living in these four cities are many times wealthier, on
average, than in other world cities such as Rio de Janeiro
and Istanbul (around US$10,000/R$22,348), which in
turn are significantly wealthier than the average resident
of Mumbai (US$1,550/R$3,464). Despite its low per capita
GVA, Mumbais level of income inequality indicated by the

Current
population in
metropolitan
region
(millions)

6.4

11.8

2010

2010

8.2

19.0

2010

2011

8.2

14.6

2011

2011

8.9

20.1

2010

2010

4.4

7.2

2011

2007

12.5

21.0

2011

2011

11.3

19.9

2010

2010

13.9

13.9

2012

2012

7.1

7.1

2010

2010

1.6

4.8

2012

2012

6.8

7.9

2011

2011

1.8

5.1

2012

2012

Gini coefficient a measure of income distribution with a

higher number representing greater inequality is nearly
half that of Johannesburg, which is the most unequal of the
twelve cities, followed closely by Mexico City, Bogot, and
Rio de Janeiro, with Barcelona and Hamburg being the most
equitable. With a murder rate of more than 20 per 100,000
people Johannesburg, Bogot and Rio are proving to be the
most dangerous places to live in. Although this figure has
been dropping rapidly in all of these cities, it remains in stark
contrast to the situation in Hong Kong, Mumbai, Barcelona,
Hamburg, Istanbul and London, which all record less than 2
murders per 100,000 people a year.
Variations in life expectancy have slowly narrowed and
residents of nearly all of the Urban Age cities can now expect
to live at least to the age of 70, with people in Hong Kong,
Barcelona, London, New York and Hamburg enjoying a
life expectancy of 80 years or above. A Carioca can expect
to live to an average age of 75.7 years. The exception is

City built-up
area (%)

Peak Density
(people per
km2)

Projected
growth 20102025 (people
per hour)

Percentage of
the countrys
population
residing in each
metropolitan
region

GVA per
capita (US$)

Percentage
of national
GVA produced
by each
metropolitan
region

Average
annual growth
of GVA
1993-2010

GIS-BASED

GIS-BASED

2011

2011

2010

2010

2010

43.3

42,300

13

6.1

10,207

10.8

2.9

79.3

59,150

26

6.3

51,337

8.5

2.8

59.3

27,100

10

23.9

47,313

32.8

2.9

36.0

49,100

33

17.1

7,158

19.3

2.9

18.0

42,400

14.8

7,981

24.9

3.7

46.6

121,300

54

1.8

1,550

3.8

6.7

56.0

29,700

27

10.5

18,116

33.6

3.2

20.0

77,300

30

18.2

9,368

27.2

3.1

30.2

111,100

31,340

3.6

32.0

56,800

11.8

22,369

13.8

2.4

20.3

55,800

22

15.9

5,430

26.2

3.6

65.1

13,500

3.8

42,270

5.1

1.4

Johannesburg at just 51 years, reflecting the HIV-related

drop in life expectancy experienced across the country.
Demographic differences are more pronounced when it
comes to patterns of age distribution. While more than
a third of the residents of Mexico City, Johannesburg,
Mumbai, and Bogot are under the age of 20 with Rio close
behind at 26.5 per cent - this drops to a fifth or less for Hong
Kong, Barcelona and Hamburg, which will have to adjust
to the socio-economic and cultural consequences of this
increasing generational imbalance.
Environmental performance indicators highlight
divergent consumption patterns and lifestyles, although
it is important to note that these figures mask significant
variations in consumption within individual cities. On
the whole, Bogot has the smallest consumption footprint,
using just 114 litres of water per person per day, compared
to 572 litres in New York, 349 in Johannesburg and 302
in Rio de Janeiro, and generating less waste than all other

Income
inequality
(measured by
the Gini index)

Life
expectancy
(years)

Percentage of
the population
under 20

cities except for Mumbai. London and So Paulo generate

the most, at 558 and 550 kg per person per year respectively.
Six of the twelve cities emit more than 5 tonnes of CO2 per
person, ten times as much as a resident of Mumbai and
twice as much as someone in Rio de Janeiro, So Paulo,
Barcelona or Bogot. Variation in car ownership is equally
drastic. At 465 cars per 1,000 inhabitants So Paulo has
the second highest motorisation rate of all cities (over 50
per cent more than Rio at 310), although improvements
in public transport over the past few years are slowing the
trend. Hamburg has more than twice as many cars per 1,000
inhabitants as New York, Johannesburg, Bogot or Istanbul
and ten times more than Hong Kong or Mumbai. Mumbai,
however, is catching up fast, with an increase of 35 per cent
in vehicles on the citys roads in the past 5 years alone. The
rapid motorisation rate is contributing to the already severe
air pollution the city experiences: at 132 g/m3, Mumbai
recorded the highest annual PM10 levels, compared to just

Murder rate
(homicides
per 100,000
inhabitants)

Percentage
of daily trips
made by
walking and
cycling

Rail network
system length
(km)

Car ownership
rate (per 1,000
inhabitants)

21 in New York, 23 in Hamburg and 38 in So Paulo. Yet the

majority of Mumbaikars still get around the city on foot or
by bicycle, making it the city with the highest non-motorised
modal share of the twelve (56 per cent). In contrast, only
11 per cent of all trips in New York are made by walking
and cycling, with most people relying on the citys nearly
600-km-long rail network, buses and taxis. Looking at rail
network systems for other cities provides an indication of
the development of their public transport infrastructure,
although it should be noted that many cities in this table
have substantial BRT networks, which are not accounted for
here. London and Barcelona have by far the most extensive
rail network (1,393 km and 1,121 km respectively), with the
average rail network length for all cities just above 500 km.

Daily water
consumption
(litres per
capita)

Annual waste
production
(kg per capita)

Annual CO2
emissions
(kg per capita)

GIS-BASED

0.54

75.7

26.5

23.1

37.1

2011

2010

2008

2011

2003

0.53

80.9

25.7

5.6

11.2

2001

2010

2008

2009

2008

0.36

80.6

23.8

1.6

26.0

2010

2010

2009

2009

2011

0.56

76.3

34.6

8.4

2005

2010

2010

2009

0.63

51.0

32.9

26.6

31.1

2009

2005

2007

2011 - GAUTENG
PROVINCE

2007

0.35

68.1

36.3

1.4

56.3

2004

2001

2001

2009

2007

0.51

76.3

31.0

11.9

33.8

2011

2010

2010

2011

2007

0.43

72.4

31.0

1.7

45.0

2003

2000

2012

2011

2008

0.53

82.5

20.1

0.7

44.7

2007

2010

2010

2009

2002

0.34

82.3

16.7

1.1

48.0

2011 - SPAIN

2010

2012

2011

2006

0.54

75.5

35.1

23.7

17.0

2011

2010

2005

2010

2008

0.32

79.8

17.1

1.0

40.0

2008

2011

2012

2012

2008

356
579
1,393
353
581
477
275
163
247
1,121
0
842

Annual mean
PM10 Levels
(g/m3)

2008/2009

310

301

525

1.9

2011

2009

2009

2005, CO2e

209

572

529

6.5

2008

2009

2009

2010, CO2e

331

167

558

4.9

2009

2010

2009

2011

294

178

489

5.9

2011

2010

2009

2000

206

349

401

5.0

2000 - GAUTENG
PROVINCE

2008

2009

2007

36

208

209

0.4

2006

2009

2009

2008, CO2e
MAHARASHTRA
STATE

465

220

550

1.4

2011

2009

2009

2005

145

195

432

3.2

2012

2010

2009

2006

56

220

529

5.5

2009

2011

2009

2011

366

163,2

474

2.3

2011

2012

2009

2011, CO2e

173

114

290

2.2

2011

2009

2009

2011, CO2e

4 74

145

453

6.6

2010

2010

2009

2010

64
21
29
52
66
132
38
59
50
32
77
23
27

RESIDENTIAL DENSITY
RIO DE JANEIRO

peak 42,300 pp/km2

LONDON

peak 27,100 pp/km2

NEW YORK

peak 59,150 pp/km2

HONG KONG

peak 111,100 pp/km2

BOGOT

peak 55,800 pp/km2

STOCKHOLM

peak 24,900 pp/km2

ISTANBUL

peak 77,300 pp/km2

BARCELONA

peak 56,800 pp/km2

MUMBAI

28

peak 121,300 pp/km2

EMPLOYMENT DENSITY
RIO DE JANEIRO

HONG KONG

peak 76,700 jobs/km2

LONDON

peak 141,600 jobs/km2

peak 120,200 jobs/km2

BOGOT

peak 61,550 jobs/km2

Overall urban density is driven by topographical constraints, the provision of

infrastructure and by inherited traditions of urban development. The highest density cities
typically have grown around a harbour with limited land availability, as is the case in New
York, Istanbul and Mumbai. Bogot is constrained by a mountainous hinterland, while Rio
and Hong Kong are bounded by both water and steep terrain.
Density is a fundamental measure of urban structure that can be used to quantify the
immense diversity in urban form across the globe. Higher urban densities can improve
service delivery efficiency, promote urban vitality and facilitate more sustainable public
transport, walking and cycling. These advantages depend, however, on effective city
management and urban design that minimises the negative costs of overcrowding and
pollution. Here we map residential densities where people live for nine case-study cities
(opposite) and employment densities where people work for six of these cities (above).
Each diagram measures density at the square kilometre scale, using a standard region of
100 by 100 kilometres.
Rio de Janeiro has a peak residential density of 42,300 people per km2 higher than
London (27,100 people per km2) and Stockholm (24,900 people per km2), but lower than
Hong Kong (111,100 people per km2), New York (59,150 people per km2) and Bogot (55,800
people per km2). Despite having areas of low but closely packed buildings and some highrise developments, Rio is relatively unique in showing consistent density levels across a
very large metropolitan region, compared to cities like New York and Istanbul where high
densities are strongly focused in the urban core. Hong Kong stands out for its high-density
development across the city, and extremely high peaks achieved by Mumbai reflect the large
families living in overcrowded conditions in many of the citys neighbourhoods.

NEW YORK CITY

STOCKHOLM

peak 151,600 jobs/km2

peak 51,950 jobs/km2

The mapping of employment densities provides a very different perspective on urban

form, and offers insights into current trends in city economies. Some of the world cities
documented here specialise in knowledge-economy sectors, such as finance and creative
industries, where competitiveness is maximised by high-density environments. In these
cities there is high demand for office space, and consequently high employment densities in
the inner core areas of New York, Hong Kong and London. New York has the highest peak
employment density at 151,600 jobs per km2, while Hong Kong (120,200 jobs per km2, much
closer to the residential density peak) and London (141,600 jobs per km 2) are not far behind.
This level of density requires an extensive public transport network to enable millions of
employees to flow efficiently in and out of central business districts on a daily basis. Rio
de Janeiro and Bogot also show high peak employment densities of 76,700 jobs per km2
and 61,500 jobs per km2 respectively, reflecting expanding service sectors, but given their
significant industrial base both cities have more dispersed spatial patterns of employment,
which, in Rios case, is spread across the wider metropolitan region.

29

INFRASTRUCTURE OF MOBILITY
A significant factor in city transformations of the last
decades has been renewed investment in public transport
and a new focus on improving urban sustainability and
quality of life through facilitating walking and cycling. The
maps below illustrate public transport networks in 9 Urban
Age cities, highlighting recently developed infrastructure
from the last 15 years (shown in orange).
Some mature cities have made improvements to

existing public transport networks and other rapidly

growing cities have invested in almost completely new
networks. London, Barcelona and Hamburg which
expanded dramatically more than a century ago - have a
rich heritage of public transport infrastructure. Recent
investment here has focussed on high speed international
rail networks, extending existing lines and connecting to
new areas of urban expansion or densification of previously

industrial areas such as London Docklands and Hamburg

HafenCity. While Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai also have
historic rail infrastructure, this is highly inadequate for
their current needs given the pace and scale of urban
growth. Rio is developing an extensive Bus Rapid Transit
system and a new metro line to integrate the wider urban
region to the West. Mumbai is constructing several new
metro lines, providing missing East-West connections.

RIO DE JANEIRO

LONDON

NEW YORK CITY

HONG KONG

BARCELONA

BOGOT

MUMBAI

ISTANBUL

HAMBURG

Public transport development (last 15 years)

30

Urban area

Intercity & regional rail

Administrative city

Infrastructure under construction

Metro

Public transport networks

Bus Rapid Transit

Light Rail

Intercity & regional rail

Metro

Light Rail

HOW PEOPLE TRAVEL

This section explores the proportion of trips made by
different transport modes in 9 Urban Age cities, enabling
an understanding of how transport infrastructure and
policies translate into real world behaviour. The extensive
transport networks found in all 9 cities ensure that public
transport use is substantial. There is wide variation in
which public transport modes are the most prominent. In
Rio, the bus dominates, with the currently limited metro

and rail networks making up only 3.3% of trips. The bus is

also most prominent in Bogot at 42% of trips. Other cities
show a more balanced picture split between rail, metro and
bus modes.
There is also widespread variation between cities in
terms of car travel. Despite the affluence of a city like
Hong Kong, only 7% use their cars for typical journeys as
a result of the exceptional efficiency of the public transport

network. New York and London display similar but less

marked patterns, with some central office areas (the City
of London and downtown New York) experiencing over
90% of public transport usage on daily basis. Despite the
experience of seemingly endless traffic congestion, only
18%, 13% and 5% of residents of Rio, Istanbul and Mumbai
use cars, with public transport and walking taking the
bigger share.

RIO DE JANEIRO

LONDON

NEW YORK

Motorcycle
2.3%

Motorcycle Other
0.1% 0.8%

Motorcycle
0.8%

Car & taxi

15.6%

Walking
33.9%

Walking
23.7%
Car
39.8%

Car
30%

18%

Private
bus
8.2%

37%

45%

34%

Bicycle
3.2%
Metro
1.8%

Rail
1.5%

HONG KONG

Taxi
1.2%

Metro
8.4%

Taxi
3.8%

58%
Taxi
1.4%

Rail
2%
The New York data refers to work travel only

Bus
14.9%

BOGOT
Motorcycle
6.1%

Other
1.2%

Metro
40.8%

Bus
13.7%

Rail
9.2%

BARCELONA
Car
6%

31%

Bicycle
2%

41%

Motorcycle
3%

Other
5%

Walking
12%
Bicycle
2%

Car
12.2%

Private bus
4.9%

Taxi
3.5%

7%

45%
48%

Bus or
tram
25.7%

Walking
45.5%

18%

Walking
44.7%

14%

56%
Taxi
3%

Metro
14.8%

Rail rapid transit

12.6%

MUMBAI
Car Two-wheeler
Rickshaw
1.6% 3.1%
1.2%
Taxi
0.3%
Bus
14.4%

Walking
55.5%

Bicycle
2%

HAMBURG
Car
13.7%

Walking
45%

Ferry
1.6%
Minibus/
dolmus/
taxi
9.3%

5%

Bus
42%

Bus Rapid
Transit
11%

ISTANBUL

Walking
28%
Car &
private
42%

13%

42%

39%

40%

45%
56%

41%
18%

Private
bus
11.5%

Bicycle
0.8%

30%

33%

Rail
3.1%

Train
21.9%

Car
22%

48%

Bus
11.9%

Light rail
1.1%

Bicycle
0.7%

11%

26%

Bus
33.1%

Walking
10.5%

Bicycle
12%
Bus
14.8%

Rail
3.8%

Public transport
18%

31

CITY
TRANSFORMATIONS
TRANSPORT INVESTMENTS
RIO DE JANEIRO: Sistema BRT (Bus Rapid Transit)
BOGOT: TransMilenio (Bus Rapid Transit)
LONDON: Crossrail

PATTERNS OF URBAN CHANGE SINCE 1980

BARCELONA
LONDON

PORT REDEVELOPMENTS
RIO DE JANEIRO: Porto Maravilha
HAMBURG: HafenCity

RETROFITTING URBANISM
RIO DE JANEIRO: Complexo do Alemo
MUMBAI: Dharavi

This section investigates examples of recent initiatives and projects that highlight the
transformative potential of recent physical interventions on the social and economic life
of six cities, moving from large-scale transport infrastructure, to the regeneration of
brownfield sites and retrofitting of urban communities.
Starting at the city-wide scale, the connections between new investments in public
transport, social equity and density are explored through the Bus Rapid Transit systems in
use and under construction in Bogot and Rio de Janeiro, and the ambitious Crossrail highfrequency rail line that is currently being built in tunnels under central London, allowing
passengers to cross this 60km-wide city in under one hour.
The dramatic changes that have reshaped Barcelona and London both Olympic
cities are documented to show the impact of subsequent phases of public and private
investment, which have transformed the social and economic vitality of these European
cities in the last decades.
Moving to a more detailed scale, the radical effects of the restructuring of city
economies are explored in the redesign of redundant port areas located in critical points of
the urban fabric of Rio de Janeiro and Hamburg, Germanys leading port city. The urban
structure of Rios Porto Maravilha and Hamburgs HafenCity are compared providing
different models of spatial intervention.
The need to improve and upgrade informal neighbourhoods such as the Complexo do
Alemo in Rio and Dharavi in Mumbai sheds light on the potential of retrofitting existing
communities with new facilities schools, streets, transport, security that make these
areas more liveable and build social capital for their residents.
32

TRANSPORT AND
SOCIAL EQUITY

RIO DE JANEIRO: SISTEMA BRT

Total system length: 159km

Budget: R$5bn (US$2.3bn)

In preparation for the Olympic Games, Rio de Janeiro is

undertaking the largest single investment in the history
of the citys transportation network, centered on the
construction of 159 km of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines.
The TransOeste line, operational since June 2012, connects
the wealthy coastal strip area of Barra da Tijuca to the south
with low-income neighbourhoods in the far West of the
city. The line has reduced average travel times along this
corridor by more than 50 per cent compared to traditional
bus trips. The remaining TransCarioca, TransOlimpica
and TransBrazil lines are currently under construction,
connecting Barra to the city centre and main international
airport to the west. These lines will improve connections
between more deprived areas in the northern zone of the
city with the western zone and city centre. As with any
relatively dispersed city Rio de Janeiro extends for over
60 kilometres in length a number of areas remain
ill-served by public transport, including some low-income
neighbourhoods.

TransCarioca

TransBrasil

TransOeste

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!!! !

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r=2km

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BRT

! !

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! !
! !

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!! !

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! !!

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!
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! !

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Zona
Central

Barra da Tijuca

TransOlmpica

TransOeste

BOGOT: TRANSMILENIO

Bogots TransMilenio BRT system is recognised as a

model of best practice of accessibility-based planning in a
developing country context. The system, operational since
2000, has grown to encompass 11 lines totalling 87 km, with
plans to expand this to more than 300 km by 2020. Recent
upgrades include Linea K towards the airport and Linea J
providing improved links to the university. TransMilenio
has enabled greater transport equity in Bogot by
significantly increasing mobility for residents without car
access, as well as by improving pedestrian safety through
linked infrastructure investments. As the map (right)
demonstrates, existing lines connect several of Bogots
lowest-income neighbourhoods with the city centre. Yet the
map also highlights that some of the poorest peripheries
of the city remain outside the reach of the current system,
partly due to the steep terrain and unpaved roads that
characterise these settlements.

Linea A

Linea E

Linea J

r
r=2km

Linea D
Linea C

Transmilenio BRT

Linea G

Linea K Linea F

LONDON: CROSSRAIL

Linea H

Shenfield

Total system length: 97km

Budget: R$51bn (US$23.3bn)
Londons ambitious new 97-km rail line, scheduled for
completion in late 2018, will connect West London,
including the major hub of Heathrow Airport, with the city
centre and strategic development areas to the east, such as
Canary Wharf and Stratford, drastically cutting travel times
across the capital. Crossrail will help to focus investment
activity in brownfield sites in the vicinity of new stations
and also play an important role as a catalyst for regeneration
in key areas of deprivation. As the map (right) shows, this
is particularly relevant to East London, where the northeastern and south-eastern branches of the line will improve
services for some of the most deprived communities in
London. Several of these areas have traditionally been
isolated from the centres of work and services due to a
lack of adequate public transport connections. Crossrail
does not, however, improve accessibility for large areas of
deprivation in north and south London. There are plans for
a second North-South Crossrail line to address this gap, yet
the great expense of tunnelling through Central London is a
significant hurdle for these proposals.

Linea B

Total system length: 87km

Budget: R$1.71bn (US$785m)

Stratford
Tottenham
Court Road

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Maidenhead

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r=2km
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Abbeywood

Heathrow

Crossrail

Canary Wharf

Income Deprivation
Lowest income,
most deprived

Highest income,
least deprived

33

10 km

TRANSPORT AND DENSITY

RESIDENTIAL
RIO DE JANEIRO: SISTEMA BRT

Average built-up density: 7,730 pp/km2

Accessibility to BRT: 49% of residents within
2 km of a stop

Rios new BRT lines connect several high-density residential

areas, particularly in the northern inner city and around the
international airport. Nearly 50 per cent of Rios population
will be within two kilometres of a BRT stop when all the
lines are completed. Yet many large high-density residential
areas will not be covered by the system, particularly innercity areas to the west and north-west. Denser areas in
the southern and central northern zone are served by the
metro and rail network. The completed TransOeste line
passes through areas of fairly low residential density before
reaching the higher-density suburbs of Santa Cruz and
Campo Grande. Rio has been expanding rapidly towards
the west, with average population increases of over 20 per
cent between 2000 and 2010, suggesting that the line will be
a timely investment to facilitate growth in an area of the city
chronically underserved by public transport.

!
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!!! !

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r=2km

! !

!
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!
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!
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r
!

BRT

! !

!
! !
! !

!
! !
! !

!
!! !

! !!

Linea B

! !!

!
!
!
! !

! ! ! ! !

Zona
Central

TransOlmpica

Linea E

Linea J

Linea A

Barra da Tijuca

TransOeste

TransMilenio routes are closely linked to areas of high

population density, with over three quarters of Bogot
residents living within two kilometres of a BRT stop. The
exceptions are the informal neighbourhoods located on
the outskirts of the city. Although there are more than 600
kilometres of additional feeder routes that move passengers
from remote areas to the main TransMilenio system, a
significant number of people continue to rely on other
forms of transport. The wealthier residents of the city get
around by car, while the more deprived continue to rely on
walking, cycling and bus, which still makes up nearly 70 per
cent of the citys public transport trips. One estimate shows
that the number of jobs reachable within an hours travel
time increased by a factor of three for families moving along
BRT lines. These programmes have the benefit of reducing
housing and transport costs, which can often consume twothirds of the income of poorer residents.

r=2km
r

Linea D
Linea C

Transmilenio BRT

LONDON: CROSSRAIL

Linea G

Linea K Linea F

Linea H

Shenfield

Average built-up density: 6,080 pp/km2

Accessibility to Crossrail: 20% of residents within
2 km of a station
Crossrail was conceived as a project to improve journey
times and capacity for east-west trips across London in
the context of the citys extensive rail and underground
networks. Although the route passes through metropolitan
town centres and important residential hubs, it is not
specifically aligned to areas of highest density, and only
20 per cent of London residents currently live within
two kilometres of Crossrail station locations. Crossrail
is expected to catalyse a significant increase in value of
commercial and residential real estate along the new line,
and to support the delivery of over 57,000 new homes
and 3.25 million square metres of commercial space. A
significant appreciation in property values is expected
immediately around new stations. This means that
residential densities along the line are likely to increase
in the future, as previously remote locations become
directly connected to the city centre and other areas with
employment and service provision.

!!

!
!
!

BOGOT: TRANSMILENIO

Average built-up density: 21,950 pp/km2

Accessibility to BRT: 76% of residents within
2 km of a stop

TransCarioca

TransBrasil

TransOeste

Stratford
Tottenham
Court Road

!
!

Maidenhead

!
!

!
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r=2km
!
!

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Abbeywood

Heathrow

Crossrail

Canary Wharf

Residential Density
Highest density,
relative to city average

Lowest density,
relative to city average
Development site

34

10 km

TRANSPORT AND DENSITY

EMPLOYMENT
RIO DE JANEIRO: SISTEMA BRT

Average employment density: 4,580 jobs/km2

Jobs accessibility to BRT: 54% of jobs within
2 km of a stop

The connection created by the TransCarioca and

TransBrasil lines between the populated areas of the
northern zone and the airport and port region will have
a significant impact on commuting times to these core
employment centres. They will also improve connections
from the North to Barra and the Olympic sites, although
there is an obvious lack of connection to the South zone,
which is served by the metro network. Three of the four
lines will converge in Barra da Tijuca, an area which
currently has fairly low employment densities, although an
increasing number of international companies have located
there in recent years. This trend is likely to be accelerated
by the improved transport connections to the rest of the
city. The presence of several large development sites along
the TransOlimpica and TransBrasil is also likely to increase
employment opportunities in these areas over the coming
years.

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! !

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r
!

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!! !

! !!

! ! ! ! !

Zona
Central

Linea E

Linea J

Linea A

!
!
!
! !

TransOlmpica

TransOeste

Linea B

! !!

Barra da Tijuca

BRT

Today the system carries 1.6 million passengers a day, and

has a throughput of 36,000 passengers per direction per
hour, which matches the capacity of Londons Crossrail
project. The map (right) shows the correlation between the
current TransMilenio lines and Bogots highly centralised
pattern of employment density. This density distribution
is essentially the inverse of the residential density map
for Bogot (opposite). TransMilenio links the main
employment corridors with the areas of highest residential
density, significantly reducing travel times for residents with
access to the system. Residents of informal settlements not
connected to TransMilenio often have a daily commute of
more than two hours and have to pay multiple fares to take
several informal minibus connections to work, consuming
as much as 15 per cent of daily wages.

r=2km
r

Linea D
Linea C

Transmilenio BRT

LONDON: CROSSRAIL

Linea G

Linea K Linea F

Linea H

Shenfield

Average employment density: 3,300 jobs/km2

Jobs accessibility to BRT: 48% of jobs within
2 km of a station
The great expense of the Crossrail project has been justified
in large part by the improved business and commuter
connectivity that the line will enable. Businesses in
Londons central clusters of the City and West End, and
the rapidly expanding location of Canary Wharf, have
long complained about the need for new public transport
capacity to allow expansion, and the long travel times to
the key airport hub of Heathrow. Crossrail is intended to
address these demands, bringing an additional 1.5 million
commuters within 45 minutes of central London and
increasing rail capacity by 10 per cent once the system is
completed. The line will significantly improve connections
between and East and West London, cutting travel times
for many journeys by half. Expanding development
locations in East London, such as the developments around
the Olympic Park at Stratford, will become more accessible
and arguably become more competitive for attracting
businesses and residents.

!!

!
!
!

BOGOT: TRANSMILENIO

Average employment density: 9,750 jobs/km2

Jobs accessibility to BRT: 88% of jobs within
2 km of a stop

TransCarioca

TransBrasil

TransOeste

Stratford
Tottenham
Court Road

!
!

Maidenhead

!
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r=2km
!
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Abbeywood

Heathrow

Crossrail

Canary Wharf

Employment Density
Highest density,
Lowest density,
relative to city average relative to city average
Development site
0

10 km

35

PATTERNS OF URBAN CHANGE SINCE 1980

BARCELONA

15
16

14

18

9
13

2
1
6
4

17

11
19
12

Growth of urban form since 1980

1980-1987
1987-1992, Olympic projects
1993-2004
2005-2010
2010 onwards

10

Growth of urban form since 1980

1980-1987
1987-1992, Olympic projects
1993-2004
2005-2010
2010 onwards

1
2
3
4
5
6

Growth of urban form since 1980

1980-1987
1987-1992, Olympic projects
1993-2004
2005-2010
2010 onwards

Kilometers
4

7
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Growth of urban form since 1980

1980-1987
1987-1992, Olympic projects
1993-2004
2005-2010
2010 onwards

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

1
2
3
4
5
6

Olympic village and Port

Seafront and beaches regeneration
Olympic venues, Vall DHebron
Olympic venues, Camp Nou upgrading
Olympic venues, Montjuic
El Raval and inner city upgrading
El Prat Airport expansion (various phases)
Ronda del Mig
Diagonal Mar and Universal Forum of Cultures 2004
Logistics hub
Barcelona Trade Fair
Port of Barcelona expansion and Cruise Liner Terminal
22@Barcelona, Poblenou innovation district
La Sagrera Station redevelopment
Torre Bar
Carretera de les aigues
Museu Nacional Art Catalunya
Tres Turons
Marina del Prat Vermell

9
10
11
12
13
14

Olympic village and Port

Seafront and beaches regeneration
Olympic venues, Vall DHebron
Olympic venues, Camp Nou upgrading
Olympic venues, Montjuic
El Raval and inner city upgrading
El Prat Airport expansion (various phases)
Ronda del Mig
Diagonal Mar and Universal Forum of Cultures 2004
Logistics hub
Barcelona Trade Fair
Port of Barcelona expansion and Cruise Liner Terminal
22@Barcelona, Poblenou innovation district
La Sagrera Station redevelopment
Torre Bar
Carretera de les aigues
Museu Nacional Art Catalunya
Tres Turons
Marina del Prat Vermell

Many
European cities have experienced the negative
impacts of waves of
7
15
8
16
deindustrialisation, successive recessions and political decline since the 1970s, but few
9
17
have
been able to respond as resiliently as Barcelona
and London. Each in their own way
10
18
11
has
pursued its own path towards recovery and growth,
with big planning, policy-led
19
12
regeneration
set
by
a
succession
of
strong
and
visionary
mayors
from Pasqual Maragall
13
14
and Joan Clos in Barcelona, to Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson in London. This has
15
resulted
in major shifts to the physical appearance, spatial dynamics and economic
16
performance
of both cities in the space of 30 years.
17
18
The maps indicate the broad time frames of this transformation since the 1980s
19
when Barcelona rediscovered its freedom after the death of General Franco and London
reinvented itself and its institutions after 15 years of absence of metropolitan governance
following the abolition of the Greater London Council by Margaret Thatcher in 1985. Apart
from creating the new role of a directly elected Mayor in 2000, London followed Barcelona
in becoming host to the 2012 Olympics, 20 years after its Mediterranean counterpart held
the successful 1992 Games.
36

8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19

Olympic village and Port

Seafront and beaches regeneration
Olympic venues, Vall DHebron
Olympic venues, Camp Nou upgrading
Olympic venues, Montjuic
El Raval and inner city upgrading
El Prat Airport expansion (various phases)
Ronda del Mig
Diagonal Mar and Universal Forum of Cultures 2004
Logistics hub
Barcelona Trade Fair
Port of Barcelona expansion and Cruise Liner Terminal
22@Barcelona, Poblenou innovation district
La Sagrera Station redevelopment
Torre Bar
Carretera de les aigues
Museu Nacional Art Catalunya
Tres Turons
Marina del Prat Vermell

8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19

Olympic village and Port

Seafront and beaches regeneration
Olympic venues, Vall DHebron
Olympic venues, Camp Nou upgrading
Olympic venues, Montjuic
El Raval and inner city upgrading
El Prat Airport expansion (various phases)
Ronda del Mig
Diagonal Mar and Universal Forum of Cultures 2004
Logistics hub
Barcelona Trade Fair
Port of Barcelona expansion and Cruise Liner Terminal
22@Barcelona, Poblenou innovation district
La Sagrera Station redevelopment
Torre Bar
Carretera de les aigues
Museu Nacional Art Catalunya
Tres Turons
Marina del Prat Vermell

Historically, land development in the two cities has been guided by two urban planning
legacies. In Barcelona Ildefons Cerdas urban grid dating from the mid-nineteenth century
has set a compact city benchmark for future development, which extends and connects
the city fabric over time. In London the combination of the 1940s Green Belt, centrifugal
transport network and large swathes of industrial land along the River Thames and its
extension eastwards has framed the pattern of development.
Barcelonas urban resurgence started in the 1980s, a decade before London. The
rebalancing was more widespread with the city providing public investment in disadvantaged
areas with over 200 public squares, open spaces and schools spread across the city as part
of the Olympic Games in 1992. The Olympics were also the catalyst to reorient the city
towards the Mediterranean by removing the railway lines and re-using industrial land that
separated the city from the sea. Post Olympics developments have focused on the logistics,
port and airport area, the Forum of Cultures and conference centre along the coast, and La
Sagrera high-speed railway hub as well as the extensive 22@Barcelona innovation district.
More recent urban policies are focusing on hitherto neglected areas on the edges of the city,
including the Torre Bar hills and Tres Turons green areas.

LONDON

16

13
19

14

11

20

12
5

16
2

18
6

17
8

15

4
16

10

River Thames

Growth of urban form since 1980

1981-1994

1990-2000
1999-2012 (hatch denotes big green projects)
2005-2012, Olympic projects
2012 onwards
Growth of urban form since 1980
1981-1994
1990-2000
1999-2012 (hatch denotes big green projects)
2005-2012, Olympic projects
2012 onwards

Docklands Light Railway (phase I)

Broadgate
4 London City Airport
5 Docklands Light Railway (phase II)
3

Growth of urban form since 1980

1981-1994
1990-2000
1999-2012 (hatch denotes big green projects)

2005-2012, Olympic projects

2012 onwards

Kilometers
4

Canary Wharf

Millennium Dome

Canary Wharf

Docklands Light Railway (phase I)

Broadgate
4 London City Airport
5 Docklands Light Railway (phase II)
3

Millennium Dome

Jubilee Line Extension

Bankside Urban Forest
9 East London Line
10 Rainham Marshes
8

11 Greenway
12 Fatwalk and Lea River Park
13 Olympic Park and fringes

Jubilee Line Extension

8 Bankside Urban Forest

14 High Street 2012

16 Crossrail

Growth of urban form since 1980

1981-1994
1990-2000
1999-2012 (hatch denotes big green projects)

Broadgate
4 London City Airport

10 Rainham Marshes

17 Tate Modern

11 Greenway

18 ExCeL exhibition centre

2005-2012, Olympic projects

Docklands Light Railway (phase II)

6 Millennium Dome
7 Jubilee Line Extension

12 Fatwalk and Lea River Park

19 Kings Cross redevelopment

13 Olympic Park and fringes

20 Barking Riverside

15 Greenwich Peninsula

2012 onwards

Canary Wharf
2 Docklands Light Railway (phase I)
3

Broadgate
4 London City Airport
5

Docklands Light Railway (phase II)

Millennium Dome
7 Jubilee Line Extension
6

Canary Wharf
2 Docklands Light Railway (phase I)
3

Bankside Urban Forest

East London Line

15 Greenwich Peninsula

14 High Street 2012

East London Line

10 Rainham Marshes
11 Greenway
12 Fatwalk and Lea River Park

16 Crossrail

13 Olympic Park and fringes

20 Barking Riverside

17 Tate Modern
18 ExCeL exhibition centre
19 Kings Cross redevelopment

High Street 2012

With the exception of Londons Docklands and
commercial
investments in the City of
15 Greenwich Peninsula
8
Bankside
Urban
Forest
London in the 1980s, Londons urban renaissance16only
kicked off in the mid to late 1990s,
Crossrail
9 East London Line
17 Tate Modern
with
the economy recovering from a period of recession
and a new alignment between
10 Rainham Marshes
18 ExCeL exhibition centre
11 Greenway
metropolitan
and national governments working 19together
a new urban agenda. A series of
Kings Crosson
redevelopment
12 Fatwalk and Lea River Park
20 Barking Riverside
large-scale
projects
such
as
Kings
Cross,
the
Olympic
Park
and
the Royal Docks the latter
13 Olympic Park and fringes
14 High
two
forming
Street 2012part of the Mayor of Londons Thames Gateway spatial strategy are part of this
15 Greenwich Peninsula
continuing
legacy that are rebalancing the East End with the citys historically more affluent
16 Crossrail
western
side.
17 Tate Modern
14

18 ExCeL exhibition centre

19 Kings Cross redevelopment
20 Barking Riverside

37

PORT REDEVELOPMENTS
RIO DE JANEIRO: PORTO MARAVILHA
0

Kilometers
0.5

0.25

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

Guanabara Bay
6

7
10

10

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

Porto Olmpico
Trump Towers
Media Village Rio de Janeiro 2016
Supervia, Central do Brasil
Morro da Providncia
Biblioteca Nacional
AquaRio
Museu de Arte do Rio
Museu do Amanh
Existing warehouse buildings

8
9
10

Porto Olmpico
Trump Towers
Media Village Rio de Janeiro 2016
Supervia, Central do Brasil
Morro da Providncia
Biblioteca Nacional
AquaRio
Museu de Arte do Rio
Museu do Amanh
Existing warehouse buildings

With the relocation of the Port of Rios commercial shipping

activities in the 1980s and the privatisation of Brazilian
ports in 1998, a large swathe of valuable urban land became
available for redevelopment, right on the doorstep of the
citys historic centre. Porto Maravilha encompasses 500
hectares (1,236 acres) occupied by empty warehouses,
industrial buildings and wharves that surround one of Rios
historic favelas, the Morro da Providncia. Its west-facing
waterfront offers extraordinary opportunities to reconnect
the city with Guanabara Bay, close to the main railway
station and the historic office district of Centro. Following
a familiar process of abandonment and part-occupation by
fringe activities (artists and small entrepreneurs), the City
embarked on a programme of revitalisation of the area that
has been given further impetus since Rio was awarded the
2016 Olympic Games.
As a delivery vehicle, Porto Maravilha has been set
up a as public agency (CDURP), which acquired the land
on behalf of the municipality, giving it full control over
10

38

future developments. Since 2009, the agency has been

tasked to sell development rights for each plot to help fund
the considerable upfront investment in infrastructure,
which includes the demolition of an elevated motorway
(typical of post-war planning in port cities in Europe and
North America), the construction of a light rail system and
undergrounding of road traffic. The objective is to create
a mixed housing and commercial neighbourhood that will
both attract major international investors and increase the
residential population in the area from 30,000 to 100,000
by 2020.
Porto Maravilha has chosen to operate a development
model that provides maximum flexibility for potential
investors. It has worked up a financial model with
maximum allowable areas for individual plots that fit
within a transport network and incentives for developers to
provide more residential space. Nonetheless, it has stopped
short of defining a three-dimensional spatial masterplan
that regulates the footprint and character of buildings and

public spaces, or the exact mix of functions on a streetby-street basis. While construction has already begun on
several large scale projects including the Olympic media
village (Porto Olmpico), five 150-metre Trump Towers
as well as high-rise hotels, residential and office towers
details of the proposed urban fabric and its porosity with
respect to neighbouring areas are yet to evolve. Cultural
projects include the completed Rio Museum of Arts and
highly iconic Museu do Amanh (Museum of Tomorrow) is
seen by some as Rios answer to Bilbaos Guggenheim.
Three per cent of the income raised from land sales is
invested in social inclusion, heritage and arts programmes
for communities living in the area. Not unlike other
projects of this scale and ambition, Porto Maravilha is
seen as an important part of the revitalisation of the citys
waterfront, but has been criticised for over-development,
increased traffic flows, alien urban typology, lack of
provision of local services and public consultation.

Porto O
Trump T

Media V
Supervi

Morro d
Bibliote
AquaRi

Museu
Museu

10

Existing

HAMBURG: HAFENCITY

1
7

Elbe River

1
2
3
4
5
Kilometers
0.5

6
7

0.25

Kilometers
0.5

Elbphilharmonie
Speicherstadt (old granaries)
Old Town
International Maritime Museum
Unilever House
Ferry Terminal
HafenCity University

Hamburgs historic role as a major European port,

going back 800 years, has been recently recalibrated
as a result of globalisation, market restructuring and
rationalisation of port activities. Located on the River Elbe,
the port remains a major force among Europes maritime
gateways, but a significant section of its dock areas was
vacated and released to the City of Hamburg as part of a
comprehensive city-wide redevelopment plan in the late
1990s. Hafencity, the 3.2km strip of over 150 hectares (371
acres) of waterfront land, provided a rare opportunity to
expand the city core by 40 per cent, connecting the historic
inner city to the water, revitalising the area with a mixeduse neighbourhood designed to promote jobs, inward
investment and inner-city living. A number of high-quality
granary warehouses close to the water provided further
opportunity to connect to the citys past.
From the outset, the City of Hamburg (which owned
the port) increased ownership of the land in HafenCity
from 75 per cent to 97 per cent as a result of large-scale

land acquisitions, giving it almost complete control over

the land and its uses. The redevelopment is managed by
HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, which is a subsidiary owned
entirely by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.
HafenCity launched a special fund called Stadt und Hafen
which owned all of the land on the site. Fifty per cent
of this land was sold upfront raising R$4.4 billion (US$
2 billion) with a further R$2.7 billion (US$ 1.2 billion)
billion of public investment. The entirety of the R$7.1
billion (US$3.2 billion) public funds were used to pay
for the infrastructure covering roads, bridges, squares,
parks, quays and promenades. However, the vast majority
of investments,around R$23.6 billion (US$ 10.8 billion)
billion, have come from private investments in real estate.
As an institution wholly owned by the City, Hafencity
works in close collaboration with its Planning Department
and shares the overall vision for how Hamburg is set to
grow over the next decades. The agency drew up a threedimensional spatial masterplan for the entire area, defining

building heights, ground floor uses, street widths, public

routes and landscaped open spaces. Connections to and
from the old inner city were to be preserved and enhanced,
taking into account flood risks and the need to ensure
active street frontages throughout. Within this overall
spatial framework, open design competitions were held
for interested parties (developers, investors and architects)
whose projects had to respect the strict design guidelines
imposed by the masterplan. Around 50 per cent of the
available land has been sold as building plots (rather than
development plots as in Porto Maravilha).
The result of the process is architecturally varied and
urbanistically consistent. It has proven attractive to the
private sector even at a time of recession in Europe, with
major media, insurance and commercial organisations
locating new headquarters on the site, alongside housing
and cultural buildings. When complete by 2015, Hafencity
will have a population of 12,000 residents and 45,000 jobs.

39

RETROFITTING URBANISM
RIO DE JANEIRO: COMPLEXO DO ALEMO

The Complexo do Alemo a complex of twelve communities - is one of the largest

and most visible favelas in Rio with a growing population of over 80,000 people. It has
undergone a continued and sustained process of upgrading and retrofitting for a number
of decades. During the 1980s it benefitted from public investment in sanitation, paving and
primary education. Since 2007, the governments Growth and Acceleration Programme
(PAC) has funded new amenities including a library, youth centre, school, health centre,
2,600 new homes and a major cable-car system with six stations that extends for nearly
three kilometres, with a maximum capacity of 30,000 passengers per day (highlighted
on the map above). The pacification process (UPP) has added local and police facilities
next to the cable car stations. 82 per cent of households are privately owned - with only 12
per cent renting. At 12 per cent, the unemployment rate is higher than the average in Rio
and over 5,000 businesses are split between services and retail, with a small number of
manufacturing activities. Some businesses are responding to the growing needs of tourists
who use the cable car system. The process of retrofitting is on-going with a new hospital
and other facilities in or next to the favela.
40

MUMBAI: DHARAVI

Dharavi is spread over 200 hectares (494 acres), the size of the Olympic Park in London
with a population of about one million people living at extremely high densities. The local
community is engaged in traditional industries such as pottery, textiles and the recycling
industry, with 80 per cent of its residents employed in the areas 5,000 businesses and 15,000
single-room factories (most of them illegal). The total turnover from formal and informal
activities is between US$500-600 million (R$1.1-1.3bn). Major problems are related to
inadequate sanitation and water supply, with only one toilet per 1000 residents. While
most houses have electricity, 70 per cent is connected on an ad-hoc basis to the national
grid and there is no official waste collection. Government interventions began in the 1970s
when the area was formally declared a slum. As a retrofitting process, there have been some
basic sanitation investments and new housing and infrastructure provided with 85 new
buildings by the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme. There are controversial plans by the Dharavi
Redevelopment Authority to transform the area by subdividing it into five sectors, with
developers providing private sector housing to subsidise social housing for eligible slum
dwellers and public infrastructure.
41

LEARNING
FROM RIO

worthy process of inequality reduction is

more effectively revealed. These figures enable
Marcelo Neri, economist and former president
of the IPEA, to affirm that 39.6 million
Brazilians entered the tier of the so-called new
middle class (class C) between 2003 and 2011
(59.8 million since 1993).4

The following essays, data and maps offer an over

view of Rio de Janeiros spatial, social, economic
and political evolution.

THE PARADOXES
OF INEQUALITY
Luiz E. Soares
Progress as a condition for
rebellion
The series of startling events in June 2013
began with a movement against increasing
public transportation costs in So Paulo.
Until then, everything seemed business as
usual, under the conservative medias fire,
with arrogant declarations made by the rightwing governor and the left-wing mayor, who
both refused to even negotiate a reduction
in transport fares. The scene was typical and
the unfolding events were predictable. At that
juncture, the protests seemed to be waning
and likely to remain local. But, on the second
day of the protests, the military police in So
Paulo offered its invaluable contribution to
the countrys history, acting with criminal
brutality, also against journalists. It was
enough to ignite Brazils collective spirit.
Within a few days the proposed increase in
transport costs had been revoked, but the
inflamed masses did not retreat.
The starting point is justified. In Rio
and So Paulo, workers spend up to four
hours every day making their way across
urban spaces jammed with cars, which have
multiplied in the last decade due to the growth
of the middle classes by 40,000 Brazilians. This
crisis in urban mobility is the unanticipated
and contradictory result of a decrease in
inequality together with rapid growth
one of whose focal points has been the car
industry. In addition, the combination of more
consumers, more access to education, and
the citizenrys increased cultural appreciation
creates a new context. Improvements have
converged in such a way that certain situations
that in the past would have been tolerated
passively, have become unacceptable.
This apparent paradox is not new: in the
nineteenth century Alexis de Tocqueville
taught us that the social groups most willing
to act and react are not the poorest and
most powerless, but rather those that have
something to lose. This means that the social
improvements during Brazils last two decades
(especially the last ten years) have broadened
the slice of the population potentially willing
to resist if faced with losing. Those who have
risen will not surrender their gains without a
fight. What gains, exactly, am I referring to?
Recent gains in Brazilian society
Using the Gini coefficient to measure income
inequality, Brazil achieved its lowest level
[representing less rather than more inequality,
eds.] in 2011, the lowest for 51 years since
this measurement was introduced in 1960.
Between 1960 and 1990, inequality grew
from 0.5367 to 0.6091. From that point it
decreased until 2010, when it reached 0.5304.
42

It continued to fall in 2011, when it reached

the lowest number ever, 0.527. Even though
the inequality coefficient was at its lowest ever
two years ago, Brazil continues to be one of the
twelve most unequal countries in the world.1
Yet luckily, a steady trend is beginning to
reverse the inequality at a considerable rate.
In the first decade of the twenty-first
century, the compound annual growth rate
in income for the wealthiest 10 per cent of
Brazilians was 10.03 per cent, while for the
poorest 50 per cent it was 67.93 per cent.
Ricardo Paes de Barros, director of social
policy and research at Brazils National
Institute for Applied Economic Research
(IPEA), points out that the 10 per cent poorest
obtained an increase in income per capita of
about 7 per cent per year, between 2001 and
2009, only a little lower than the celebrated
average growth in per-capita income in China.
He estimates that few countries could achieve
an outcome comparable to Brazils decrease of
income inequality between 1999 and 2009. The
10 per cent wealthiest Brazilians held 47 per
cent of national income, and that decreased
to 43 per cent, while the 50 per cent poorest
had 12.65 per cent of total income in 1999, and
went on to earn 15 per cent by 2009.2
The fact that stands out most is that in
1993, the year before the implementation of
the Plano Real (designed to control inflation),
23 per cent of Brazils people lived in extreme
poverty. In other words, they did not have
access to the income necessary to consume
the minimum number of calories required for
healthy survival. The Plano Real transformed
that devastating situation in one year. In 1995,
the first year of Fernando Henrique Cardosos
first term as President, the percentage of the
population in extreme poverty decreased
from 23 per cent to 17 per cent. By 2003, the
proportion of people in extreme poverty had
remained the same. In 2009 it fell to 8.4 per
cent. While it is still an excessively high and
unacceptable number, it is much lower than it
was at the beginning of the 1990s.
In 1993, there were 51 million Brazilians
with a monthly household income below
R$752 (2011 value, US$450). In 2001, there
were 46 million. By 2011, the number had
decreased to 24 million. In 1993 there were 41
million Brazilians whose monthly household
income was between R$752 and R$1,200,
and dropped to 38 million by 2011. On the
other hand, there were 45 million people in
1993 whose household income was between
R$1,200 and R$5,147 and that figure more
than doubled, reaching 105 million by 2011.
Note that during the 18 years in question (1993
to 2011), Brazils population grew at a slower
rate than previous decades. The accelerated
growth, seen in the 1940s (when the average
birth rate was 2.39) and the 1950s (when it
reached 2.99), fell in the 1990s (to 1.64) and
even further (to 1.17) in the first decade of the
twenty-first century.3
When the dynamics of demography are
taken into account, the meaning behind the

Plural agendas and the collapse

of political representation
The agenda of this evolving political movement
is not uniform, and each participant holds up
his small sign with a proposal, a criticism, a
demand, in formal language or with humour,
whether it is against homophobia or the
technocratic authoritarianism of governments.
Meanwhile, in spite of the immense thematic
spectrum, some topics are constant: public
transportation, urban mobility, corruption,
police brutality, unequal access to justice, more
resources for education and health, and fewer
resources for building lavish stadiums for the
2014 World Cup, or the 2016 Rio Olympics. In
this way, the price of public transport ticket
merely put a metonymic chain into circulation
in Brazils individual and collective imaginary,
connecting the most diverse contemporary
national issues. And each individual felt
motivated to contribute to this epic narrative
their own description of what they find to be
the fundamental and urgent drama. Note that
the legitimacy of the federal government was
never seriously questioned.
The common axis, however, underlying
these diverse positions, is an indignant
proclamation of the collapse of political
representation. The protestors have lost faith
in parties and politicians who renew their
mandates through the electoral system without
realising that a mere respect for the rules of
the game is not enough to keep democracy
on its feet. Since the establishment of the 1988
Constitution, following 21 years of military
dictatorship and three hybrid years, Brazil has
been a democratic state that follows the rule
of law. But democratic institutionalisation
came to be seen by the majority of society
as a hollow shell, a form without content,
taken over by unscrupulous political agents.
The formal endorsement of members of
parliament and political rulers through the
electoral process, in a country where voting
is obligatory, does not guarantee legitimacy
from societys point of view. The breakdown
of political representation has occurred while
the countrys leadership has demonstrated no
sign of understanding the magnitude of the
abyss that could open up and swiftly deepen
between political institutionalism and the
feeling of the majority.
The defining characteristic of the current
movement is its intensity. The protests
occur in the language of excess: many
people, all day long, demonstrating about
every possible theme and topic and there
is always the exalted and violent minority
that defaces public property. On the fringes
a few professional crooks go along for the
ride, as well as those who enjoy destroying
things for no reason. Why the passion and
intensity? I suggest a hypothesis: the linked
political problems and symbolic bonds are,
as I explained, interrelated, accentuating
one permanent feature: inequality. And this
happens in an institutional and normative
context, the democratic state under the rule
of law, where equality is the declared and
reiterated principle. For this reason, negative
associations become aggravated, accentuating
the emotional intensity with which they are
experienced and communicated: anything
that condones inequality stands out because it
strongly contradicts the expectations created
by the constitutional pact. In the end, is the
dialogue about citizenship worth it or not?

Persistent historic inequities

Despite the very significant reduction in
inequality, it persists in many forms. Just
as violence and police brutality against the
poor and blacks persist. The outrageous
inequality between blacks and whites has been
decreasing, but it endures, revealing structural
racism within the country. Between 1950 and
1980, whites lived 7.5 years longer on average
than blacks and mulattos classifications
used at that time. In 1980, the life expectancy
of blacks remained at 59 years. In 1987 the
white population lived on average until the
age of 72, while the life expectancy of blacks
was 64.5. Another lurid confirmation. In
1980 the infant mortality rate of blacks and
mulattos was the same as the infant mortality
of whites in 1960: 105 out of every 1000 live
births. Skin colour, which means nothing
according to those who believe in the myth
of Brazils racial democracy, separated life
expectancy among blacks and mulattos by
20 years from the social advances achieved
by the white population, advances that would
have been impossible without the labour of the
non-whites.5
Marcelo Neri provides revealing data about
three phenomena, the historical significance
of which is profound. First, the demographic
effect of the social construction of Brazilian
identity: the portion of society that defines
itself as black is growing dramatically. If you
compare the last two censuses executed by
Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics,
2000 and 2010, the number of blacks in Brazils
population increased by 22.6 per cent. In my
mind, the main reason is the growing political
consciousness of Afro-descendants, who
increasingly acknowledge their colour and
what it means with pride.5
The second phenomenon studied by
Neri is the shocking level of inequality. The
probability that a person who calls themselves
white is poor is 49 per cent less likely than
someone who is black, and 56 per cent less
likely than a mulatto. For example, a white
illiterate middle-aged woman who lives in a
favela in the city of Salvador is 29.4 per cent
less likely to be poor than if she is non-white.
The 2010 census made clear the colour of
economic inequality, indicating that 70 per
cent of extremely poor Brazilians are black.
I can add other alarming figures regarding
violence, public safety and the criminal justice
system.6 The Mapa da Violncia, published in
2011, reveals that in 2002 to 2008, the number
of blacks who had been murdered grew by
20.2 per cent, while the number of white
victims of the same crime decreased by 22.3
per cent. There is no doubt that blacks and the
poor are the main victims of the worst crime
premeditated murder just as they are the
main victims of lethal policy brutality and
illegal searches.
The third phenomenon is good news.
Between 2001 and 2009, 44.6 per cent of
income growth occurred among blacks, 48.2
per cent among mulattos and 21.6 per cent
among whites. The growth of the proportion of
the black population in Brazil and the extreme
significance of increased access by black
youths to university thanks to the affirmative
actions of policies such as the Programa
Universidade para Todos (Prouni) and bank
loans for blacks has created a new scenario
that bodes well for the future democratisation
of Brazilian society. According to data released
by IPEA in its Boletim Polticas Pblicas:
acompanhamento e anlise (No. 19), the net
rate of student enrollment among 18- to
24-year-olds grew more than five-fold between
1992 and 2009. While in 1992 only 1.5 per
cent of young blacks entered university, in
2009 8.3 per cent pursued higher education. In
this period the net rate of enrolment of young
whites jumped from 7.2 per cent to 21.3 per

cent, and the contingent of black students grew

from 20.8 per cent of the total white group in
1992 to 38.9 per cent in 2009.7
From invisibility to the fight for
recognition
Another important dimension of the current
political climate is captured by access to the
Internet. In 2011, 115,433,000 Brazilians aged
ten or older owned a mobile phone (in 2005, a
little less than half, 56,105,000 Brazilians, had
mobile phones) and 78,672,000 surfed the web.
The growing participation in social networks
made the June 2013 protests viable, which then
began to depend on the conventional media
itself. In addition, it has allowed Brazilians
to identify themselves and put in practice
the global model of taking over public spaces
as a kind of direct democracy or political
action not mediated by institutions, parties or
representatives. The model recalls the classic
idea of direct democracy as the ideal, while not
achieving it entirely.
Once begun, the mediations never
cease, connecting different institutionalised
processes to the energy of the masses in the
public squares. What matters in this dramatic
scenario are idealised memories and common
languages, as if these events were cited
mutually creating a virtual constellation of
hypertexts.
In this context, it becomes possible to feel
included in the transnational narrative about
new democracy; to feel pride for those who felt
disrespected and invisible before public power;
to promote the identification with the persona
of the civic hero, where collective political
experiences become cult entertainment
for the anti-political (even if it involves the
risking of ones life); to engage in a fraternal
and gregarious experience (before an enemy
that is abstract and ghostlike while being
obviously and immediately identified with the
face of a police officer); and, to participate in
an experience that fills ones heart with joy,
exalting the emotions and elevating them to
an almost spiritual level.
This text, originally entitled Ground-shakes in a country of
inequalities and paradoxes, was written just after the June
2013 protests that took place in many of Brazil major cities. It
is an edited version of the text that was originally published
in Los Angeles Review of Books on 1 July 2013; see http://
lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1821 for the full text.
Original translation by Magdalena Edwards.
1
2
3

6
7

By comparison, the UKs Gini coefficient is 0.34, while

South Africas is 0.63, eds.
Paes de Barro cited by Rafael Cariello in O liberal contra
a misria, in Revista Piau, No. 74, November 2012, p. 30.
Elza Berqu, Evoluo demogrfica, in Ignacy Sachs,
Jorge Wilheim and Paulo Srgio Pinheiro, eds., Brasil, um
sculo de tranformaes, So Paulo, Cia das Letras, 2001,
p. 17.
Marcelo Neri, A Nova classe media. So Paulo, Saraiva,
2011, p. 26; PNAD Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra
Domiciliar, by IBGE, Instituo Brasileiro de Geografia e
Estatstica.
C.H. Wood & P.L. Webster, Racial inequality and child
mortality in Brazil. Mimeo, 1987, APUD; Berqu,
op.cit., 27; Garcia Tamburo, E.M., Mortalidade infantile
da populao negra brasileira, Texto NEPO 11,
Campinas, NEPO/UNICAMP, 1987, APUD.
Silvia Ramos and Leonarda Musumeci, Elemento supeito,
Rio de Janeiro, Civilizao Brasileira, 2005.
For data on college attendance see: hhtp://www.ipea.gov.
br/igualdaderacial.

Luiz E. Soares is anthropologist,

film-writer and commentator,
based in Rio de Janeiro.

CLOSE, YET FAR

Srgio Magalhes
and Fabiana Izaga
Arriving in Rio de Janeiro in 1955, Nelson
Pereira dos Santos, the director of Rio 40
Graus [Rio 100 degrees Fahrenheit] a film
that received an award at the Film Festival
of Braslia was enraptured by the view of
what he called the exposed favela. Originally
from So Paulo, Nelson described how he
found the perfect backdrop to the narrative
of the ambiguous relationships of proximity
and distance between the bourgeoisie of the
asphalt, and the majority black population
and rogues living on the hillsides in the
South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. Although
spatially close, that did not mean that they
were integrated. In So Paulo, the favelas were
not as exposed as those of Rio, juxtaposed
with middle-class apartment buildings of
the characteristic hillsides, typical of Rio de
Janeiros South Zone. With its depiction of
Brazilian reality through one day in the life of
five kids in a favela in the North Zone Morro
do Cabuu who sold peanuts in Copacabana,
Po de Acar hill, and at the Maracan
stadium, some of the citys main tourist
attractions, the film inspired the Cinema
Novo movement.
Since then, socio-spatial relationships
in the city of Rio de Janeiro have deepened,
and cannot be viewed simplistically through
dual oppositions, as is sometimes attempted.
Between the hills and the asphalt, legality and
illegality, or even in the idea of a divided city,
there is a lot more. The classic definition of rich
central areas and poor outskirts manifested
itself alongside the existence of pockets of
poverty within wealthy neighbourhoods. The
relations of proximity and distance between
social groups focused on their material
expressions, juxtaposed throughout the city,
and came to represent and structure the
metropolis of Rio de Janeiro.
The favelas, seen as a place of poverty,
samba and trickery, and precarious areas
ignored by public authorities, have gone
through significant transformations since
then. From the early 1970s onwards, the
urbanisation, or upgrading, of the favelas
has provided positive experiences in some
communities that received infrastructure
and pavements, the basic requirements of
urbanisation. In Rio de Janeiro, for instance,
this process was strengthened in 1993 and
following years with the Favela-Bairro
programme created by the Municipality.
However, perhaps the most remarkable
aspect of low-income settlements including
the favelas, but also the irregular land
divisions and housing complexes is the
presence, from the 1990s onwards, of armed
violence, which has settled into those areas
in connection with drug trafficking. The
existence of areas dominated by organisations,
gangs or commandos came to define
territories of exception, characterised by the
absence or scarcity of the State, shaping a
social reality in which there is no rule of law.
It is only since 2008 that these areas have
been tackled by public authorities, through
the Pacifying Police Units, or UPPs. What
we need is a better way to understand how
these areas have come about and how they are
ingrained in the political, social and economic
fabric of the city.
The origins of armed violence
Initially, the city treated favelas as provisional
settlements, with the expectation that
development would soon arrive and replace
them. This meant that these sites were ignored.

This was followed by a period in which the

Brazilian State banned them, at the same time
as it discouraged the construction of rental
housing and took up the task of producing
subsidised homes a task that was evidently
not accomplished. The favelas could not be
part of the city map.1 And since they were not
on the map, the problem was solved. This legal
determination prevailed even into the 1990s.
Irregular developments, in turn, appeared
in the mid-twentieth century, at a time when
accelerated population growth could not be
accommodated in rental houses and when
there was no funding for the construction of
homes. The families that did not want to live
in the favelas occupied new areas in the West,
building their own houses.
We could think that both the favelas and
the clandestine development areas resulted
from low-income families adopting the
nuclear family model, which they achieved
without support from collective savings.
Thus, favelas and irregular settlements did
not come about as a rejection to the city; they
actually show the willingness of poor people to
integrate in the city.
Housing complexes are the result of
government decisions. Throughout the
middle decades of the last century, complexes
were built as the main and almost
exclusive housing policy action. Residential
complexes were to a large extent aimed for the
compulsory resettlement of families living
in favelas that were demolished by public
authorities.
In Rio de Janeiro, recent data (2010)
indicates the existence of about 425,000
households in 763 clusters called subnormal,
including favelas, irregular development
areas, and settlements without infrastructure
or land ownership. These numbers suggest
that about 1.5 million people live in informal
areas, or about 25 per cent of the population of
Rio. The first census of the favelas, carried out
in 1948, revealed the existence of about 35,000
households, 138,000 inhabitants, or 7 per
cent of the total population. This significant
increase marks the tortuous trajectory of poor
people in relation to the citys housing stock.
Favelas, developments and housing
complexes are the three main models of lowincome urban settlements in Brazil. In Rio de
Janeiro nearly half of its population lives in
these conditions. This is clear when we look at
the city map.
Common conditions
From the point of view of access to
infrastructure and urban services, the degree
of integration of these settlements varies. But
there is a condition common to almost all of
them: the absence of the State. Governments
are not as present as they are in the ordinary
city on the asphalt. Even in the residential
complexes of Cidade de Deus, Vila Kennedy
and Vila do Joo/Mar, where regular
settlements were created, governments usually
do not provide good public services to the
residents.
Regularisation of property, for instance,
does not exist, even though the earliest
communities date back to the 1960s. Absence
or lack of State presence is not a way of
saying public services are bad, it is much
more: a reality in which there are no effective
laws governing society. In most of these lowincome settlements, tenancy law does not
apply. Relationships between landlords and
tenants are mediated by forces that do not
comply with the Brazilian Constitution. In
case of tension, the parties will seek to resolve
their conflicts with support from the powers
that replace the absent State.
The tax code and building laws have no
power either. In those favelas, in case of land
divisions and housing developments where the

State is not present, there are no guarantees

that the right to legal defence, the right of the
adversary or the right to come and go key
pillars of the Brazilian Constitution will be
respected. So, what are the rules in force? How
are they established? Who enforces them?
Structuring of territorial control
Without a rule of law, these settlements are at
the mercy of organisations or gangs for which
the areas have some value. In general, the value
attributed is one linked to the drugs trade.
Today this business is certainly a relevant
aspect, but it is no longer the only one, and
perhaps not even the most important.
Illegal trade of public services, like
transport, communications and electricity,
are part of everyday life in these settlements,
the control of which has acquired increasing
value. Recently, with the advent of the milcias,
security services were also created. The
construction of irregular housing is another
very profitable business, with much better
profits than the ones in the formal housing
economy. And, as rent collection cannot be
dissociated from the dissuasive argument
of the strongest, it reinforces the circle of
illegality, secrecy, and of the better armed.
In Rio de Janeiro, the way territorial
control is structured is no longer based on
drugs sales points, but on a network. By
consolidating itself, this network of illegality
forms islands that are controlled by different
laws. The absolutists at the top exceed the
control of their territories and expand their
tentacles beyond the archipelago. Thus, the
network also unfolds over the legal urban
fabric and reaches successive neighbourhoods
and important regions of the city.
Thus, in these territories ignored by the
State, an economic-political-social network
has been established with negative impacts on
the economy, politics, society, and urban life.
Causes and effects x recovery and
permanence
Since urban violence has become part of
everyday life, it was first understood to be part
of the economic forces of modernity. Trapped
between authoritarianism and social chaos,
illegality was seen as part of a kind of political
protest. Next, violence was treated in a context
of symbiosis between marginality and the
agents of the State, where corruption was the
common element. To this we could add the
absence of fully-shared moral boundaries,
which attributes a certain incentive to illegality
in the pursuit of social mobility. Permeating
these stages, there were several ways to tackle
violence based on the role of the repressive
apparatus of the State, which assumed greater
or lesser importance, without connections to
the social, political or economic causes.
It was only after the Brazilian State lost
its legitimacy and citizens their spirit that
the Pacifying Police Units, or UPPs, started
to be deployed from 2008 onwards. Since
then, there has been an arduous attempt to
re-constitutionalise those territories. This does
not mean the end of clandestine networks. On
the contrary, the symbolic recovery that is the
result of the presence of the State in these areas
represents the beginning of a new process.
Close, yet far from the rest of the legal city,
those territories of exception are beginning to
recover their citizenship. Permanent services,
viewed as banal in great part of the city, such
as regular refuse collection, home delivery of
goods and mail, among others, in addition
to the simple possibility for children to get
to and from school in safety, have started to
happen without the threatening control of
drugs trafficking. With the now permanent
presence of the State, it is a matter of time
before services reach these areas. The ways
vary, and new problems may arise. In the
43

LIVES APART

With a population of over 130,000,

the Complexo da Mar is one of Rios
largest unpacified favelas. Travelling
from the Mar to Leblon a high income
neighbourhood in Rios South zone- life
expectancy decreases by nearly half
a year for every kilometre travelled.

44

South Zone, boutique hotels have already

arrived, and sightseeing tours take place in the
pacified favelas, attracted by the proximity of
the wealthy areas and the fine views over the
city. However, many areas of the metropolis,
especially the North Zone, from Bonsucesso to
Iraj, remain critical.
Once the initial stages of recovery of
these territories are overcome, one of the
main challenges arising is the permanence of
public services which cannot be understood
merely as the presence of police forces. Full
consolidation of state control is essential. The
recent mass protests have brought to the fore
the issue of lack of consistent public urban
development policies. Our cities still need a
more cohesive agenda, with a much stronger
commitment to urban development.
1

According to Rio de Janeiros Municipal Legislation of

1937.

Srgio Magalhes is President

of the Brazilian Institute of
Architects. Fabiana Izaga is
Vice-President for Institutional
Relations of the Brazilian Institute
of Architects - Rio de Janeiro.

WORK HAS ONLY

JUST BEGUN
Julia Michaels
In Brazil, change has always come slowly,
while inequality has weighed heavily. In
this context, Rio de Janeiro developed with
informal settlements scattered among
middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods. The
rich didnt want to live on hilltops without
electricity, water or rubbish and sewage
collection, but they didnt mind if their
servants resided conveniently close by.
Such geography led to a symbiosis that
produced rich interconnecting webs of
personal relations, Carnival, samba, funk,
beach culture, art, and much else worth
celebrating. At the same time, those webs,
unchecked by government or the press,
together with a phase of liberalisation
following the departure of the 196485
military government, allowed criminal
gangs to take over and run informal
territories, or favelas.
As kidnappings and other crimes spread,
and the economy foundered, in the 1980s
Rio lost banks, the stock market and much
else, to So Paulo. Factories closed. The citys
downtown and its contiguous port went into
decay and lost its residential population.
Due to the ensuing safety issues as well as
the daunting complexity of urban renewal,
residents, commerce, investment and real
estate developers turned westwards to rural
and empty beachfront areas within the city
limits.
This exodus was particularly devastating
for the industrial and working-class North
Zone, close to the port and the international
airport (which then became assets for those
who went into the drugs and weapons
businesses). But even the glitzy South Zone
Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon suffered
private- and public-sector neglect and
depreciation, with residents dodging bullets
flying off drug-dealers hilltops.
And, although there are few hilltops in
the expanding lagoon-dotted West Zone, a
similar pattern emerged there: construction
workers and other unskilled labourers
were relegated to the edges of mangrove
swamps, while their employers swarmed
to beachfront property, gated communities

and shopping malls. Ultimately, the city had

allowed developers to build what amounted
to a Brazilian Miami without a sewerage
system or effective public transportation.
Traffic jams, favelas and clogged lagoons
ensued, with the citys poorest section in its
furthest reaches.
The 1990s and 2000s saw the rich
building ever-higher walls in the entire
city, hiring ever-bigger armies of security
personnel, and keeping close to home
and work. The city withered. In the latter
decade, the Rios state-run police force,
largely corrupt (partnering with the drug
and weapons trade), kept an uneasy peace
by way of periodic incursions into North
and South Zone favelas. In the West Zone,
off-duty and retired police and firemen
organised milcias. Welcomed at first, these
groups evolved into violent extortionist
gangs with their own wheeling and dealing
in the areas of transport, bottled cooking gas
and infrastructure and got themselves duly
represented on the city council and in the
state legislature.
With the election of Srgio Cabral as
governor in 2006, the Rio police took a new
approach to public safety, which gained
continuity with his 2010 re-election. Dubbed
pacification, the largely successful policy
focuses on retaking territory from drug
traffickers, mostly in the North and South
Zones. Reducing daily gun violence directly,
so far, for about 500,000 favela residents, the
policy has halved Rios homicide rate (to 24
per 100,000 a year, although numbers seem
to fluctuate slightly between sources), raised
real estate values, drawn investment and
allowed citizens greater mobility. 1
Thus began an urban turnaround that
now faces huge challenges. Rio has become
in effect two cities. The sprawling West Zone,
riddled with milcias and new construction,
will host most of the 2016 Olympic Games.
The degraded, more densely populated
North and South Zones, safer than in
decades past, are starting to integrate both
formal and informally settled areas into a
single vibrant fabric.
Then there is the Centre, where tunnels
and open areas will replace an elevated
motorway, augmenting access to the Bay.
Light rail transportation will connect new
office buildings in the renovated port area
to the traditional centre. A cable-car system
will take residents and tourists up and down
to Rios oldest favela, Morro da Providncia.
What the expanded downtown will look
and feel like in five or ten years is an open
question.
It should be noted that all of this takes
place in a context of nearly full employment,
the result of local petroleum and gas
investment, a series of mega-events, federal
funding for local initiatives, significant
national economic growth (starting to ebb
now), and the widening of Brazils socioeconomic pyramid, with thousands of
Rios 1.4 million favela residents joining the
formal economy and the lower ranks of the
middle classes.
The challenge is basically to transform
a two-tier system (public, for the poor, and
private, for the better-off) of transport,
education, public safety, housing and health
into something more democratic. Added
to this are the inefficiencies of a state-run
public sanitation company that provides
water to just about everyone, but collects and
adequately treats the sewage of only 30 per
cent of the city.
The transformation requires changing
the priorities, the mindset and the
standing of a host of entrenched interests,
political and economic. These interests
have long called the shots in Rio. Elected

representatives rubber-stamped the mayor

and governors wishes, with little initiative
or accountability to voters, perpetuating and
strengthening the power of urban players,
including the milcias, bus and construction
companies, and real estate developers.
The elected city council is apparently so
useless that Mayor Eduardo Paes, a modernminded, yet authoritarian young politician
voted into a second term last year, appointed
a new City Council of 136 members to advise
him on two strategic plans. Notably, none
of its illustrious, mostly white, mostly male,
members live in a favela.
Meanwhile, citizens have traditionally
shunned what they consider to be dirty
politics, with the upper classes simply pulling
strings when they need to. Local media,
virtually monopolised by the Globo empire,
have only this year begun to report on how
Rio truly functions.
To further close the inequality gap,
preserve diversity and hasten lasting social
change in other words, to realise its
enormous cultural and economic potential
the city of Rio proper (population 6.3 million)
must now provide full-blown city and state
services to both formal and informal areas,
address transportation issues stemming from
urban sprawl, and bring together North, South
and West Zones into a workable territory that,
at 1,182 km2, is an enormous challenge even
without the neighbouring towns that double
the population to a metropolitan area of twelve
million souls. In comparison, New York City,
covering 1,213 km2 and London, at 1,572 km2,
are each home to just over eight million. But
these megalopolises are set in more highly
developed democracies, with many more
checks and balances on urban development.
Governor Cabral and Mayor Paes,
supported by ample federal funding, have
achieved much. Yet the progress seems
diminished by the long roster of what remains
to be done:
Coordinate with neighbouring cities
around metropolitan issues such
as harbour clean-up, inter-municipal
transport, employment and long-term
public safety policies. Greater Rio
accounts for three quarters of the states
total population of 16 million.
Demilitarise and unify Rios several
police forces, with better training and
efficiency, to reduce abuse and improve
pacification efforts. Although public
safety officials have arrested growing
numbers of drug traffickers, they must
also address criminals flight within the
metropolitan area.
Focus on housing, particularly low-
income, and particularly close to jobs.
Housing policy centres on the federal
low-income Minha Casa Minha Vida
(MCMV, My House My Life) programme,
plagued by corruption, bureaucracy,
shoddy construction, and a lack of
community participation and vision as to
where and how low-income families
should live in dignity. The MCMV
programme contracted the build of 90,211
homes in the state of Rio de Janeiro, and
by last July had only delivered 16,216
units. Other efforts have produced even
smaller results.
Further improve public health and
education, while increasing coordination
between state and municipal levels.
Make good on a widely heralded
programme, Morar Carioca, to upgrade
all favelas by 2020, now scaled back to
provide infrastructure only due to lack
of government funds and market
incentives.
Further improve public transport. This

has focused on connecting the West

Zone to the rest of the city, with dedicated
bus lanes and an extension to a line of
the state metro concession. Experts
call for upgrades of existing North Zone
train lines, to keep residents closer to the
centre and add value to a region in
decline. The city has noticeably
reorganised and improved bus service
but this still falls far short of passenger
demands, at the centre of constant
pressure on the city council.
The constant pressure on the elected city
council demand has arisen from street
demonstrations that erupted last June, settling
in downtown Rio and outside the governors
South Zone offices and apartment building.
Before June 2013, it looked as though
Rios transformation would undermine the
unusual symbiosis among its diverse groups,
gentrifying the South and some North Zone
hilltops and pushing westwards those unable
to afford these areas. It seemed as though the
historic port area, almost wholly restricted
to office buildings, museums and cruise ship
services (including tourism), would remain
mostly dark and silent at night and
on weekends.
This may still happen. But politicians have
demonstrated increased sensitivity to voters.
Some backtracking has occurred, and new
dialogues are under way. Growing foreign
interest and pressure, together with better
access to information and a sense that real
change is possible, are fuelling the process.
Notably, significant give and take,
particularly on the subjects of mobility and
housing, has begun between city hall and
the local chapter of the Brazilian Architects
Institute, which represents the citys top
architects and planners. The mayors July
decision to allow urban renewal for residents
of Vila Autdromo, an informal settlement
previously in the path of Olympic Village
bulldozers, indicates the possibility of
preserving, in some cases, the positive features
of informal settlements. And the governor is
rethinking plans to privatise the renovated
Maracan football stadium, set to exclude
less prosperous sports enthusiasts and slated
to demolish a public school, a swimming
complex and a building used by Brazilian
indigenous groups.
Rios citizens and media (and, perhaps,
the politicians themselves) have begun to
understand that politics need not be quite
so dirty. In fact, whats occurring in Rio de
Janeiro is a transition away from a favourexchanging populist system towards a more
complete participatory democracy. And
this, though messy and unpredictable, can
only bode well for one of the worlds most
charming and unique cities.
1

United States Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic

Security, OSAC. Brazil 2013 Crime and Safety Report:
Rio de Janeiro. Available at https://www.osac.gov/Pages/
ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=13966.

Julia Michaels is a journalist and

produces the RioReal blog.

45

IN THE VIOLENT
FAVELAS OF BRAZIL
Suketu Mehta
My Brazilian friend Marina and I were picking
up a visiting friend from New York, who heads
an NGO, in her hotel lobby near Paulista, the
most prestigious avenue in So Paulo. It was
7.30pm on a busy Friday night last October.
We walked up to a taxi outside the hotel. I sat
in the front to let the two women chat in the
back. I saw a teenage boy run up to the taxi
and gesticulate through my open window. I
thought he was a beggar, asking for money.
Then I saw the gun, going from my head to the
cell phone.
Just give him the phone,
Marina said from the back seat.
I gave him the phone. He didnt go away.
Dinheiro, dinheiro!
I didnt want to give him my wallet.
The boy was shouting obscenities.
Dinheiro, dinheiro!

The boys body suddenly jerked back, as

a mans arm around his neck pulled him off
his feet. The man, dressed in a black shirt,
was shouting; he had jumped the boy from
behind. He started hitting the boy. The taxi
driver sitting next to me was stoic. He said that
this had never happened to him before, but he
couldnt have been more blas.
The next thing I saw was the boy and
another teenager, probably his accomplice,
running away fast up the street. The man in
the black shirt chased them a bit, then came
back panting to the taxi. Did the bastard get
anything? our saviour ... asked. He wasnt a
plainclothes cop, as Id originally thought; he
was just an ordinary citizen who was tired of
the criminals. The taxi driver drove us to the
nearest police station. Two lethargic cops were
the only people there. We get ten of these a
day, just in this precinct, said one of them. The
other cop went over to check in his register.
Three before you today. There are 319 armed
robberies a day in So Paulo.
Everyone in this country has a story. The
cities of Brazil are some of the most violent
places in the world today. More people are
murdered in Brazil than in almost any other
country. In 2010, there were 43,684 murders,
22 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC), compared to the global rate of 6.9
or to Londons rate of 1.6 (in 2009). Between
5 to 8 per cent of Brazilian homicides are
solved compared to 65 per cent of murders
in the US and 90 per cent of murders in the
UK. Most of the victims are male and poor,
between 15 and just shy of 30. The homicide
rate has shaved seven years off the life
expectancy in the Rio favelas.
The violence hasnt prevented Brazil from
emerging on the world stage as the preeminent
country in Latin America. Next year, it will
host the World Cup, two years after that the
Olympics. Between 2003 and 2011, Luiz Incio
Lula da Silva Lula Brazils remarkable
president, brought about one reform after
another that improved the countrys economy.
Rousseff, his successor, was until the protests
of this June favoured to win a second term
next year. Both she and Lula are from the
centre-left Workers Party. Now, while not
growing as fast as it did in the days before the
crisis of 2008, the economy is still the worlds
seventh largest.
Brazilians like to think of themselves as
a multiracial society, but a walk around the
favelas of the cities demolishes this myth.
Most of the residents have a dark complexion,
46

much darker than most of the rich who live by

the water or in the suburbs, and darker than
most of the young people who have recently
been protesting in the streets. Over the last
year and a half, I have been visiting So Paulo
and, especially, Rio de Janeiro, observing
the process of pacification, by which the
government attempts to peacefully enter and
re-establish state control over the most violent
enclaves of the city; those dominated by drug
gangs, called traficantes, or by syndicates of
corrupt police called milcias. Until 2008,
when the pacification programme started,
the traficantes controlled roughly half of the
favelas, and the milcias the other half. Both
still hold power in most favelas. The ultimate
aim of the state government of Rios plan,
called the Unidade de Polcia Pacificadora
(UPP), or Police Pacification Unit, is to drive
both of these groups out and replace them by
the state.
Today, of Rios 6.3 million people, 1.4
million live in the favelas. There are some 630
of them, containing more than a thousand
communities. The state government aims
to pacify 40 of these favelas by the time
of the World Cup next year a kind of
demonstration effect that will get attention
from visitors. In the past, the police would raid
individual favelas, capture or kill the biggest
drug dealers, and leave. They would soon be
replaced by other dealers, and the violence
would continue. The new strategy is not to
target individual drug dealers. It is to take
back territory, a high-ranking police official
told me.
Under the UPP program, elite police units
and in some cases troops from the army and
even the navy invade the favelas and stay for
up to three months. Then they are replaced
by the regular police and squads of UPP
civil servants. The UPP establishes schools
and rubbish collection, brings in public and
private companies to provide utilities such
as electricity and television, and hands out
legal documents such as employment and
residency certificates. In the areas under
its control, the UPP has set up community
security councils, which attempt to mediate
conflicts between local hotheads before they
spread. The message is: the State is here to stay.
So far, the programme has generally been seen
as a success, and was a major factor in the reelection of Srgio Cabral in 2010 as the state
governor backed by the Workers Party.
One night in Rio, Walter Mesquita, a
street photographer, took me to a baile funk,
a street party organised by the drug dealers,
in the unpacified favela of Arar. It was
an extraordinary scene: at midnight, the
traficantes had cordoned off many blocks,
turning the favela into a giant open-air
nightclub. One end of the street was a giant
wall of dozens of loudspeakers, booming songs
and stories about cop-killing and underage
sex. Teenagers walked around carrying AK47s; prepubescent girls inhaled drugs and
danced. On some corners, cocaine was being
sold out of large plastic bags. Everybody
danced: grandmothers danced, children
danced, I danced. It went on until eight in the
morning.
Although such parties are officially
prohibited in the pacified favelas because of
their multiple breaches of the law, ranging
from noise violations to exhortations to
murder even the music played there is called
baile funk proibido the State and its forces
were nowhere to be seen. The rival gangs were
a bigger threat than the police. The three gangs
that control much of Rio have remained more
or less stable for the last couple of decades: the
Red Command, the [Pure] Third Command,
and Friends of Friends. According to a top
police official I spoke to, in a city of just over
6 million there are some 30 to 40 thousand

people in the gangs.

The day after the baile funk, I was flying
in a police helicopter over Rio. It took us over
Ipanema and the newly pacified favela of
Rocinha. I asked if we could fly over Arar.
The pilot pointed it out in the distance, and
said he could not fly directly over it. He was
concerned about getting shot down. A couple
of years ago, the traficantes had brought down
a police helicopter with anti-aircraft guns.
This, too, is the future of many megacities
in the developing world, from Nairobi to
Caracas. There is a de facto sharing of power
between the legitimate organs of the state and
the gangs, the milcias. Many people will die
as the exact contours of this power sharing are
negotiated.
Mrio Srgio Duarte is the high-raking
police official who led the invasion of Alemo,
one of the largest and most dangerous favelas
in Rio. In an eight-day operation in 2010,
the police found more than 500 guns: 106
carbines, rocket launchers, bazookas, 39
Browning anti-aircraft guns. Pacification
started with me, he tells me in the bar at
the top of my hotel. Duartes mother was a
seamstress, his father was murdered in 1972
over a personal dispute. Duarte studied
philosophy in college, but chose to join the
police force. His T-shirt says, Listen as your
day unfolds.
In the 1980s, cocaine from Colombia
and Bolivia started coming into the favelas,
accompanied by Eastern European AK-47s
from Paraguay. A carbine, such as an AK47 or M-15, now costs around R$15-20,000
(US$6,800-9,000). The traficantes have
rocket launchers now, says Duarte, better
weapons than the police, who have .38s and
9-millimetre revolvers. Each year, some 50
cops and around 1,500 traffickers are killed.
Last year, over a hundred police in So Paulo
were murdered by the drug dealers, and police
promised to kill five bad guys for every cop
killed.
The drug trade in just one favela, Rocinha,
Duarte tells me, runs to around a million R$
(US$450,000) per week. But its not just drugs.
The dealers run a parallel economy in pirated
cable TV, phones, and moto taxis, and have
their own systems of justice. We dont expect
drugs to be stopped, just the violence with
the drugs, Duarte says. He points to Santa
Marta as an example of a pacified favela where
drugs are still traded, but there are no visible
weapons, no king of the hill.
The state government has increased
the armed police force in Rio from 36,000
to 42,000, towards a target of 50,000, with
another 10,000 civilian police... Their salaries
start at R$1,500 reais (US$680) per month,
and in six years go up to R$1,900 (US$860).
A policeman stationed in a pacified area gets
another R$500 a month to help him fight
the temptation to take bribes or join one of
the violent syndicates the milcias run by
corrupt police.
What is happening in the favelas of Rio is
not so much pacification as legalisation. The
dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985 was
brought down after many years and great
sacrifices. Everyone who was not connected
to the junta was its victim. People rushed to
spend their pay as soon as they got it in their
hands, because by the afternoon it would be
worth much less. When democracy came,
everybody the rich in Leblon and the poor in
Rocinha felt they should benefit from it, and
in Brazil, for a time, most people did.
But in the favelas there was no democracy.
The traffickers continued with their own
dictatorship; the people of the favela still had
great trouble getting access to the courts
or casting a vote. Pacification is an attempt
to interrupt a despotic process. It is, for the
construction workers and ladies who sell

feijoada a black bean stew in the slum, the

final fall of the dictatorship.
During the last twenty years, the drug
dealers took informal control of much of life
in the favelas, including, most importantly,
music, the cultural lifeblood of Brazil. Our
challenge is what will happen after the
pacification, I was told by Ricardo Henriques,
who was until last year the head of the
Instituto Pereira Passos, the governments
urban think tank that formulates policy for
the UPP. As Henriques rather optimistically
sees it, the takeover of the favelas will happen
in three phases. The first consists of the police
moving in and denying the drug dealers
the ability to do what they want, legally and
culturally. The second: Its a little bit boring,
the police are here. The third phase consists
of the state replacing the prohibited culture
by an officially sanctioned culture, or at least
culture that doesnt continue to glorify rape
and murder. You do it in a creative manner,
explained Henriques. No guns. Less erotic,
but really creative. The music is not proibido.
For decades, the favelas have existed in a
parallel system to the rest of Brazil. The idea
of the state is to stay there for the long, long
term, Henriques said. He wants to reduce the
inequality between the favela and the rest of
the city. If this schematic-sounding vision of
pacification works and the ongoing protests
throughout the country are putting it in doubt
what would come after it? One night I went
to a jazz club in the favela of Tavares Bastos,
which had been pacified for a year, right below
the headquarters of the Batalho de Operaes
Policiais Especiais (BOPE). The rooms of the
club were packed with sweaty bodies and
heavy with marijuana smoke. If the BOPE
wanted to find drugs it wouldnt have to go far.
But it will never come here, because these are
people from the rich, white areas of Ipanema
and Leblon. The only black people I could see
were the saxophonist and my guide, the street
photographer, who lived here. The people
from the favelas cant imagine themselves
here, said the photographer. The music was
bebop and bossa nova, an American idea of
the jazz that Brazilians listen to. No samba
here, much less funk.
The club was opened five years ago. A
beautiful white economist who works for a
bank, wearing an expensive dress, told me she
was already bored. Two years ago there used
to be more interesting people. Now I only see
all the people I would see near the beaches.
It costs R$50 (US$23) to get in; a beer is R$15
(US$7). On the way to the club, I passed a
number of small cafs. In some, neighbours
were enjoying beers that cost a third as much.
In one, pleasantly overweight couples were
dancing close together to samba. All the lights
in the houses of the favela were out; it was
after midnight. But the white patrons on their
way to the jazz club were raucous, laughing,
energised by the thrill of the expedition to this
clandestine destination.
In Tavares Bastos, and in favelas like
Cantagalo, with its easy access to the rich
southern zone of Rio and increased security
after the pacification, the residents are being
forced out, not by violence, which they can
live with, but by high rents, which will make
living there impossible. Their right to live there
was protected as long as it was illegal. After
pacification, the biggest threat to long-time
residents of the Rio favelas will come not from
drug dealers, but from property dealers.
(c) 2013 The New York Review of Books/Distributed by The
New York Times Syndicate

Suketu Mehta is author of

Maximum City, and Associate
Professor of Journalism at New
York University.

RESILIENT COMMUNITIES

Motorcycle taxis skirt the crowds on

the narrow streets of Rocinha, one of
Rios recently pacified favelas that sits
cheek-by-jowl with the citys affluent
neighbourhoods.
47

SELF, COMMUNITY
AND URBAN
FRONTIERS IN RIO
DE JANEIRO
Sandra Jovchelovitch
Rio de Janeiro is a city of multiple and
contradictory layers, at once exposed
and hidden by its beauty and complex
topography. The distances and overlaps
between its neighbourhoods and people
are vast and operate at many levels, all
immediately noticeable to the senses of
those who are in the city. Walking in Rio,
close to the Atlantic Ocean, or beyond,
through its forests, mountains, people
and buildings, it is difficult to focus the
eye on one single aspect, because the key
characteristic of the city is juxtaposition
and mixture, a vibrant carnival of
geography and humanity, a space that is
both urban and psycho-social, made of
many lives, emotions, representations and
behavioural patterns.
Nowhere is this more evident than
in the contrast between the favelas and
affluent paved areas of the city, described
in the everyday language of Cariocas, as
the dichotomy morro/asfalto (hill/asphalt),
a signifier everyone understands and uses
to navigate the complexity of divisions
and lines of segregation that characterise
Rio. The separation morro/asfalto is deeply
connected to the process of urbanisation
in Rio de Janeiro, which kept apart and yet
grew dependent on the favela communities
it marginalised.
Officially called urban subnormal
agglomerates, Rios favelas are ecosystems
of great complexity, in which a rich and
diverse sociality coexists with chronic lack
of state services, and heavy social control
imposed by drug bosses and police violence.
Since the 1980s drug cartels have gradually
gained control over favela territories,
initiating an undeclared and subterranean
war with the police. Caught in the middle of
this confrontation, favela dwellers became
a target for the police and over-exposed to
the routes of socialisation established by the
institutional and business-like character of
narco-traffic.
As the population of favelas grew,
the increase in violence and homicides,
combined with the chronic lack of services
and socio-economic deprivation configured
an environment of intense social exclusion.
Despite being integral to the economy
and socio-cultural life of the city, favela
communities were pushed underground,
their actual sociability and multiple life
forms hidden away by geographical, social,
economic, symbolic and behavioural
barriers.
This preponderance of marked urban
frontiers is a central aspect of Rio de Janeiro
and a major component of life in the favelas.
Favela dwellers love their communities as
well as the city, but they are acutely aware
of borders and separation. Crime, violence
and marginalisation are equated from the
outside with the identity of favela residents,
who regularly experience discrimination
as they cross borders into the wider city.
Negative representations and the stigma
generated in the asphalt hurt both socially
and psychologically by barring access
to work and earnings, and by affecting
identity and self-esteem. The words inside
and outside are strong signifiers, deployed
to express both differences between the
48

urban worlds and the sharp borders that

separate them. Border controls in the
city are subjectively internalised: people
understand that there is danger when
crossing into different favelas and feel the
pain of prejudice and discrimination when
crossing into other areas of the city.
These issues can be illustrated by
the psychosocial cartographies of four
communities of Rio: Cantagalo, Cidade
de Deus, Madureira and Vigrio Geral,
each located in a different area of the city
(enter image 1 about here). Cantagalo and
Vigrio Geral fit the accepted definition of
favelas, whereas Cidade de Deus was built
as a planned area for relocating faveladwellers displaced from the city centre
during the 1960s. Madureira is a formal
neighbourhood surrounded by favelas. In
their similarities and differences, each one
of these four communities illuminates how
geographical borders intersect with social
and psychological frameworks to connect
territory, community identity and a sense of
self in the city.
As with any map, psychosocial
cartographies are established by
borders. These can be more or less
porous, depending on a combination of
psychological and geographical elements,
which establish the relations between the
favelas and the city. These elements include
the range and quality of social institutions
present in a community, its location in
relation to the wider city, the presence or
absence of urban connectors, the experience
of leisure of its inhabitants and the social
representations held by the city as a whole
about the area.
Cantagalo
It is located between Ipanema and
Copabacana, at the heart of South Rio and
its beautiful natural landscape. It benefits
from the state services and commercial
facilities of these formal neighbourhoods,
despite the absence of these from the favela
itself. The community is connected to
Ipanema by a lift and a paved road, which
makes it easy to come and go, even more so
since the expulsion of the drug trade and the
introduction of the Pacification Police Unit
(UPP). Social representations of the area
are mixed, including positive and negative
dimensions. There is flow both ways in terms
of leisure, services and intergroup contact,
making Cantagalos borders highly porous.
Madureira
It is in the centre of North Rio and open
to the city, although distance gives some
density to its borders. There are multiple
institutions in Madureira and the
neighbourhood enjoys its own facilities and
vibrant popular culture. It is placed at the
crossroads between the different cultures
of Rio and offers multiple references for
the sociability of its residents. Madureira
is associated with poverty, but also with
conviviality and important cultural
traditions of the city. Its large market is a
strong urban reference, and samba schools
such as Portela are exemplary of its rich
influence in the life of Rio. Its borders show
medium to high porosity; they are very wide
and not controlled by the drug trade.
Cidade de Deus
It is located remotely in the western part
of Rio, close to forests and to the Barra
neighbourhood, its beach and overall
facilities. References for sociability
are focused on the drug trade and the
evangelical churches, although the
UPPs are introducing a new, if uneasy,
relationship with the state. There is freedom

to come and go but leisure is concentrated

inside the community, mainly for fear
of discrimination. Dominant social
representations of Cidade de Deus continue
to link the community to the drug trade,
poverty and violence. Its borders show low
porosity: they are no longer controlled by
narco-traffic, but internalised segregation
keeps the horizons of the community
primarily inside its own territory.
Vigrio Geral
In Vigrio Geral, scarcity of social
institutions and distance from the city
reduce the references for the sociability of
its residents, which is polarised between
AfroReggae, an important NGO originated
in the community, and the drug trade.
The drug trade is the central organiser
of community life, and, along with the
evangelical churches, AfroReggae, and the
sporadic presence of the police, comprise
the social institutions of the favela.
Crossfire and stray bullets are part of
everyday life; the area is closed and tightly
controlled, and circulation is difficult.
Vigrio Geral is strongly associated with
wars between factions of the drug trade and
the violence of the police. The territory of
the community circumscribes the leisure
and the horizons available for its residents.
Levels of porosity in community borders
shape the context that is offered to pathways
of socialisation inside favelas as well as
the nature of the relationship between the
communities and the wider city. Levels
of porosity of borders correlate with the
breadth of social networks and potential
crossings that are available in the everyday
life of favela dwellers. The broader the
networks and looser the borders, the more
the experience of the self is broadened. The
denser the borders, the lesser the chances of
expanding networks and crossing into the
wider city, while the need and importance
attributed to the few institutions, good or
bad, that operate in the community rise.
Porosity of borders between peripheral
communities and the wider public sphere
of the city is a major factor defining the
routes of socialisation and the individual
and collective experience of the city.
Actions on the flexibility of urban frontiers
are central for the enlargement of the self,
the regeneration of territories of exclusion
and for giving back to favela dwellers
the right to the city. Keeping borders
open contributes to the transformation
of identities and the development of
citizenship. It connects a divided society
and avoids the formation of ghettos that
isolate and prevent the vibrancy embedded
in the social and cultural encounters of
the contemporary city. The Viaduto in
Madureira and the Centro Cultural Waly
Salomo in Vigrio Geral are exemplary
of these processes: they operate as places
of encounter, learning, development,
psychosocial containment and conviviality,
bringing the city to the favela and the favela
to the city. In regenerating the public sphere
and the built environment of popular
communities, they also regenerate Rio de
Janeiro, establish a bridge between hitherto
separated social worlds, and take a further
step towards the communicative city.
The experience of Rio corroborates the
need to decentralise urban planning and
consolidate the vistas offered by the mixed
city of the twenty-first century. Cleaning
the city of its poor by removing favelas and
unwanted populations from sight is not a
sustainable urban solution, and not only
because it violates the fundamental right to
the city. The study of favela life shows that

despite social exclusion there is resilience,

a powerful culture and a proud collective
intelligence living on the edges of the city.
To recognise the favela and the potentials
of its people, culture and economy
requires urban policy committed to social
integration, without which Rio de Janeiros
development will always be partial.
Sandra Jovchelovitch is
Professor of Social Psychology
at the London School of
Economics and Political Science
and co-author of Underground
Sociabilities, a study of Rios
favelas.

Legend
Community Assets
Urban Blocks
Favelas (as defined by Rio gov.)
Green Space
Retail Activity

"

Rail / Metro Station

Major Highway
Rail Lines
Access Routes

"

Lift Access

Madureira

Samba School
Creche

ntica

Mercado
de Madureira

Morro do
Cantagalo

"

Technical College

Morro So Jos

Nursery School

AfroReggae
Criana Esperana Centre

Madureira Market

Vila das Torres

Samba School

a Atla

Pavo-Pavozinho

UPP Station

Ballet Dance Group

Grota

Aveni
d

Capoeira
Group

Boxing Club
Youth Centre

Cantagalo

School

"

Hospital

"

Sanatrio

School

Samba School

"

Ipanema/General Osrio

"

Madureira

Viaduto CUFA

School

CUFA Centre

Avenida Vieira So

uto
Parque Garota de Ipanema

Cidade de Deus

Vigrio Geral
UPP Station

UPP Station

Loteamento Josu

Santa Efignia
Moquio

Military Land
School

School

Vigrio Geral

"

Parque Proletrio de Vigrio Geral

ASVI Community Centre

Youth Foundation

School
Rua Moiss

CUFA Community Centre

C I
D E

D A D E
D E U S

Cultural Centre
Samba School

AfroReggae
Cultural Centre

Pantanal

Sports Square

Bar
Residents Association

Praa da Bblia

School

Military Land

Travessa Efraim

UPP Station

Vila Nova Cruzada

Parque Jardim
Beira Mar

49

CITY DYNAMICS
160

30,000

140

25,000

GDP per capita (R$/year)

120

Population (millions)

100

80

60

20,000

15,000

10,000

40

5,000
20

0
1960

1950
Urban

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

1999

Rural

2002

2003

2004

State of Rio de Janeiro

2005

Agriculture
0.4%

Government
services
19%

2010

Economic Transformations
Rios socio-economic renaissance is underpinned by a
national economy that has been growing rapidly over the
past decade, and has weathered the global recession nearly
unscathed. For the Municipality of Rio, per capita GDP more
than doubled since 1999, increasing to more than R$30,000
(US$13,000) in 2010, with the total GDP for the city now
at more than R$190bn (US$85bn). The presence of large
reserves of oil and natural gas off the coast of the State of Rio
de Janeiro has further boosted Rios economy in recent years.
The State is currently responsible for 74 per cent of Brazils
total oil production, holding more than 77 per cent of the
nations oil reserves and more than 60 per cent of the natural
gas reserves. In terms of GVA, Rio is one of a small number
of cities in the world that are re-industrialising, largely due
to the record investments in the oil and natural gas industry,
which are expected to generate 250,000 new jobs across the
country by 2016. Between 1995 and 2010 the contribution
of the extractive sector to state GVA increased from one per
cent to ten per cent. This same sector is behind more than
R$2.4bn (US$1.1bn) in oil and natural gas royalties flowing
into State of Rio de Janeiros coffers in 2011, with a further
R$2.6bn (US$1.2bn) going directly to the municipality.
This is nearly twice as much as the funds received by all
other states in Brazil combined, although the current
restructuring of royalties payments has put this reliable
influx of cash into jeopardy.

Oil & other

minerals extraction
10%

Manufacturing
10%
Health &
education
3%

19%

28%

Construction
6%

Real
estate
9%

Retail,
repairs &
maintenance
11%

Other
services
39%

2009

2010

Utilities
2%

59%

2008

Municipality of Rio de Janeiro

Construction
7%

20%

2007

Source: Instituto de Pesquisa Econmica Aplicada (IPEA)

Oil & other

Agriculture minerals extraction
1% 1%
Manufacturing
10%

20%

2006

Gross domestic product per capita

Source: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatstica (IBGE)

Government
services
20%

2001

Brazil

Urbanisation in Brazil

1995

2000

Utilities
2%
53%

Retail,
repairs &
maintenance
11%

Business
services
7%

Financial services
9%

Domestic
services
4%

Food & hospitality

3%
Financial
services
6%

Information Transport & logistics

5%
services
4%

Sectoral composition of the economy

Share of economic activities in gross value added of State of Rio de Janeiro (1995 and 2010)
Source: IBGE

50
Percentage of the population living on less than R$140/month

Royalties from oil and natural gas production (thousands R$/year)

2,500,000

2,000,000

1,500,000

1,000,000

500,000

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0

2011

Brazil

State of Rio de Janeiro

All other Brazilian states

Oil and natural gas royalties

Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region

Poverty reduction

Source: IBGE

Source: IETS

0.62

0.60

Gini coefficient

0.58

0.56

0.54

0.52

0.50

0.48

1993
Brazil

1994

1995

Income Inequality
Source: IETS

50

1996

1997

Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region

1998

1999

2000

2001

Over the past 60 years Brazils population nearly quadrupled,

reaching 190 million inhabitants in 2010. The vast majority
of this growth has been accommodated in cities: while only
36 per cent of the population lived in cities in 1950, this
figure increased to 84 per cent by 2010, making Brazil one
of the most urbanised countries in the world today. The rapid
rural to urban migration has accelerated the growth of Rio
de Janeiro into a city of more than six million people, with
a metropolitan region nearly double that population.
Rios population has been growing steadily since the latenineteenth century, with accelerated growth in the postWorld War II years and gradual slow-down in recent years.
However it is only in the last ten years that Rios economic
growth has outpaced its population growth.

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

Social Transformations
Over the past twenty years, the countrys strong economic
growth coupled with a continued political commitment to
social equity has led to a remarkable transformation in socioeconomic realities of the countrys poor. The percentage of
the population living in poverty (income of less than R$140/
US$62 a month) has decreased substantially since 1993,
with a marked drop following the 2003 introduction of the
Bolsa Famlia, a social welfare programme introduced by
former president Lula that has lifted millions of families
out of poverty across the country. In 2011, only 16 per
cent of the population of the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan
Region was categorised as living in poverty, a reduction of
more than 50 per cent compared to 1993 levels. Inequality
also improved for Rio over this time period, although the
change is nowhere as drastic as for Brazil as a whole, which
experienced a reduction in its Gini coefficient (a measure of
inequality) from 0.60 to 0.53. This is due to the positive effect
the Bolsa Famlia programme and other social policies have
had in combating rural poverty and moving large numbers
of people into the middle class. Despite these encouraging
developments, Rio remains a highly unequal city, where
extremes of wealth and poverty continue to exist side by side.
From 1991 to 2010, life expectancy in the Municipality of
Rio increased from 67.9 to 75.7 years while infant mortality
dropped from 30 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000. The metropolitan

50

78

45

76

40
Infant mortality (deaths per 1,000 )

80

Life expectancy at birth (years)

74
72
70
68
66

35
30
25
20
15

64

10

62

60

1991

2000

2010

Source: IBGE, www.atlasbrasil.org.br

80

150

70

135

150

120

60
Homicides per 100,000 inhabitants

Educational attainment
(Percentage of metropolitan population above 15 years of age)

2010

Infant mortality

Source: IBGE, www.atlasbrasil.org.br

50

40

30

20

105
90
75
45
30

10

15

1993

1995

1997

Primary school

1999

2001

2003

Secondary school

2005

2007

2009

Higher education

2011

Illiteracy rate

Education and illiteracy

Brazil

Brazil 15-24 year-olds

Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region

Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region 15-24 year-olds

Homicides

Source: IETS

Source: www.mapadaviolencia.org.br

100

2005

Sewage
7%

99

Solid waste
14%

98
Percentage of municipal population covered

2000
Municipality of Rio de Janeiro

Brazil

Life expectancy

1991

Municipality of Rio de Janeiro

Brazil

level illiteracy rate dropped from 6 per cent in 1993 to 2.9

per cent in 2011, a significant achievement compared to the
rate of 8.4 per cent reported for the rest of Brazil in 2011.
Secondary school graduation rates have doubled over the
same period. However, 31.9 per cent of the metropolitan
population above 15 years of age did not finish primary
school and less than 20 per cent go on to study beyond
secondary school.
In the first decade of this century, new policies
were implemented in Brazil to reduce crime levels and
homicides in particular. In 2003, legislation was passed
introducing tighter controls on firearms, in conjunction
with disarmament campaigns. Following the 2006
introduction of the UPP programme in Rio de Janeiro, the
city experienced a marked drop in homicides, especially
among its young population, although the current rate of 23
homicides per 100,000 inhabitants remains higher than for
most other global cities.

Agriculture &
forestry
2%

97
96

Road transport
39%

Industrial processes
& product use
4%

95

Fugitive emission
& refinery
1%

94

Industry
12%

93
92

Public sector
2%

91

Residential &
commercial sector
10%

90

1991

2000

Waste Collection

Running Water

Air transport
9%

2010
Electricity

Sanitation and electricity

Greenhouse gas emissions by sector

Waste collection data excludes informal areas of the city

Source: www.atlasbrasil.org.br

Source: Rio de Janeiro Municipal Environment Department (SMAC)

500

1000
465

400

800
775

374

300

Km of bicycle lanes (2013)

Cars per 1,000 inhabitants (2011)

900

429

320

310

135 Transformations
Physical
While120
an impressive 99 per cent of municipal households
now have
105 running water and electricity, and almost all
formal neighbourhoods receive regular waste collections
services, waste collection in the favelas remains patchy and
comprehensive recycling services are only slowly picking
up across the city. Rio already generates 525 kg of waste
per person every year, comparable to the rates of cities
like New York and London, and the waste sector accounts
for a staggering 21 per cent of Rios total greenhouse gas
emissions. Road transport is responsible for a further
39 per cent of emissions, highlighting the importance of
rethinking the citys transport infrastructure. This will
help address some of the sustainability concerns while also
improving accessibility, another central issue for the city.
Rio is growing towards the West, which has seen average
population increases of over 20 per cent between 2000 and
2010. This population shift is driving development in the
area. In 2011, whereas 611 residential and commercial units
were added to the Centro and Port Area, over 15,806 units
were added in Barra da Tijuca and its surrounding areas. Due
to the distance and limited public transport connectivity
to the city centre, modal splits in these neighbourhoods
are heavily oriented towards car use, putting further strain
on the citys already congested road network. The city is
adding more than 200 new cars to its streets every day and
has now reached a motorisation rate of 310 cars per 1,000
people. Current investments in the BRT system are aiming to
improve accessibility along the main growth corridors and
provide an alternative means of transport for millions of the
citys residents. Additionally, Rio has doubled the number of
cycle lanes in the city since 2009, creating the largest cycling
network in Brazil and quickly catching up with Bogot as
the most bicycle friendly city in Latin America. Currently
measuring 320 km, the extension of the citys bike lanes is
part of a bigger initiative to reach 450 km in time for the
Olympic Games in 2016.

294

200
173

675
600

400
376
320

100

200
118

150

18
0

0
Rio de
Janeiro

Motorisation

Bogot

Mexico City

Buenos
Aires

Porto
Alegre

Belo
Horizonte

Source: Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP)

So Paulo

Rio de
Janeiro

Porto
Alegre

Curitiba

So Paulo

Bogot

New York

Berlin

London

Cycling infrastructure

Source: For full references please see http://rio2013.lsecities.net/newspaper/

51

RIO DE
JANEIRO

52

53

RIO: A CITY IN TRANSFORMATION

Urban built area

Complexo do Alemo

Un-built land

Cidade de Deus

Water

Leblon

Favela

Barra

Pacified favela (UPP)

Forest

Bonsucesso

Santa Cruz

Mangrove/area subject to flooding

Beach
Rio 2016 Olympic venue

1 TransOeste (BRT line)

Porto Maravilha

2 TransOlimpica (BRT line)

Vacant land in urban areas (over 20ha)

from IPP Uso Do Solo 2011

3 TransCarioca (BRT line)

City administrative boundary

5 Riocentro Exhibition and Convention Centre, Athletes Village

Bus RapidTransit (existing)

6 Olympic Park, Barra da Tijuca

Bus RapidTransit (planned)

7 Deodoro

Metro extension (in progress)

8 Copacabana

4 TransBrasil (BRT line)

Cable Car (Complexo do Alemo)

9 Parque do Flamengo

Contour (100m intervals)

10 Marina da Glria
11 Maracan

54

Airport

12 GaleoAntonio Carlos Jobim International Airport

Cristo Redentor

13 Porto Maravilha, Morro da Providncia and Olympic Media Village

2.5

Kilometers
10

12

A
E

13

11

10
9

6
C

55

URBAN TYPOLOGIES
Nestled between steep mountains, mangrove swamps and
the Atlantic Ocean, Rio de Janeiros complex urban form
has always been shaped and constrained by its dramatic
topography. Together with the unequal distribution of
wealth and contrasting formal and informal development,
Rio has produced very distinct characteristics of urban
form and order. Six neighbourhoods have been selected
to display typologically diverse but nonetheless typical

Carioca qualities. Arranged from highest to lowest density,

the aerial photographs, figure-ground maps (showing built
form in black and all open space in white over 1 square
kilometre) and street-level images provide a snapshot of
spatial variety in a dynamic city that includes informal
hillside settlements, high-rise gated communities, everyday
suburbia and traditional urban fabric overlooking the
Copacabana waterfront.

A COMPLEXO DO ALEMO

B CIDADE DE DEUS

C LEBLON

Density: 37,000 pp/km2

Density: 21,560 pp/km2

Density: 20,890 pp/km2

Built-up land: 54.7%

Built-up land: 39.8%

Built-up land: 45.5%

Average annual income: R$7,540 (US$3,374)

Average annual income: R$10,710 (US$4,792)

Average annual income: R$92,160 (US$41,239)

56

D BARRA DA TIJUCA

E BONSUCESSO

F SANTA CRUZ

Density: 14,990 pp/km2

Density: 14,570 pp/km2

Density: 6,940 pp/km2

Built-up land: 17.5%

Built-up land: 56.4%

Built-up land: 24.7%

Average annual income: R$97,250 (US$43,516)

Average annual income: R$19,680 (US$8,806)

Average annual income: R$14,280 (US$6,390)

57

58

URBAN AGE
The Urban Age programme, jointly
organised by LSE Cities and supported
by the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the
international forum of Deutsche Bank,
is an international investigation of the
spatial and social dynamics of cities.
The programme centres on an annual
conference, research initiatives and
publications. Since 2005, twelve conferences
have been held in rapidly urbanising
regions in Africa and Asia, as well as in
mature urban regions in the Americas and
Europe.
ORGANISED BY
LSE Cities
LSE Cities is an international centre
supported by Deutsche Bank whose mission
is to study how people and cities interact
in a rapidly urbanising world, focusing on
how the design of cities impacts on society,
culture and the environment. Through
research, conferences, teaching and public
lectures, the centre aims to shape new
thinking and practice on how to make cities
fairer and more sustainable for the next
generation of urban dwellers.
Extending LSEs century-old commitment
to the understanding of urban society, LSE
Cities investigates how complex urban
systems are responding to the pressures of
growth, change and globalisation with new
infrastructures of design and governance
that both complement and threaten social
and environmental equity.
Alfred Herrhausen Society, The
International Forum of Deutsche Bank
The non-profit Alfred Herrhausen Society
is the international forum of Deutsche
Bank. Its work focuses on new forms of
governance as a response to the challenges
of the twenty-first century. The Alfred
Herrhausen Society seeks traces of the
future in the present, and conceptualises
relevant themes for analysis and debate.
It works with international partners
across a range of fields, including policy,
academia and business, to organise
forums for discussion worldwide. It
forges international networks and builds
temporary institutions to help to find better
solutions to global challenges. It targets
future decision-makers, but also attempts
to make its work accessible to a wide
public audience. The society is dedicated
to the work of Alfred Herrhausen, former
spokesman of the Deutsche Bank board
of directors, who advocated the idea
of corporate social responsibility in an
exemplary manner until his assassination
by terrorists in 1989. The Alfred Herrhausen
Society is an expression of Deutsche Banks
worldwide commitment to civil society.
London School Of Economics and
Political Science
LSE is a specialist university with an
international intake and a global reach.
Its research and teaching span the full
breadth of the social sciences. Founded in
1895 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and set
up to improve society and to understand
the causes of things, LSE has always put
engagement with the wider world at the
heart of its mission.

LSE CITIES
Executive Group
Ricky Burdett, Director, LSE Cities, London
School of Economics and Political Science
Philipp Rode, Executive Director, LSE
Cities, London School of Economics and
Political Science
Fran Tonkiss, Academic Director, LSE
Cities, London School of Economics and
Political Science
Governing Board
Paul Kelly (Chair), Pro-Director
and Professor of Political Theory,
Directorate, London School of Economics
and Political Science
Ricky Burdett, Director, LSE Cities, London
School of Economics and Political Science
Thomas Matussek, Managing Director,
Alfred Herrhausen Society
Rahul Mehrotra, Professor and Chair
of the Department of Urban Planning
and Design, Graduate School of Design,
Harvard University
Philipp Rode, Senior Research Fellow and
Executive Director, LSE Cities, London
School of Economics and Political Science
Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology,
and Honorary Fellow, London School
of Economics and Political Science and
University Professor of the Humanities,
New York University
Nicholas Stern, IG Patel Professor of
Economics and Government and Chair,
Grantham Research Institute on Climate
Change and the Environment, London
School of Economics and Political Science
Ute Weiland, Deputy Director,
Alfred Herrhausen Society
Advisory Board
Richard Sennett (Chair), Professor of
Sociology, and Honorary Fellow, London
School of Economics and Political Science
and University Professor of the Humanities,
New York University
David Adjaye, Principal Architect,
Adjaye Associates
Alejandro Aravena, Executive Director,
ELEMENTAL S.A.
Amanda Burden, Commissioner, New York
City Department of City Planning
Jos Castillo, Principal, Arquitectura 911 SC
Joan Clos, Executive Director, UN-Habitat
Job Cohen, Leader, Labour Party, the
Netherlands
Marcelo Ebrard, Mayor, Mexico City
Sophie Body-Gendrot, Emeritus Professor,
University Paris-Sorbonne and CNRS
Researcher
Amanda Burden, Commissioner, New York
City Department of City Planning
Jos Castillo, Principal, Arquitectura 911SC
Joan Clos, Executive Director, UN-Habitat
Job Cohen, Leader, Labour Party, the
Netherlands
Marcelo Ebrard, Mayor, Mexico City
Richard Haryott, Chair, Ove Arup
Foundation
Anshu Jain, Co-Chairman of the
Management Board and Group Executive
Committee, Deutsche Bank
Julian Le Grand, Richard Titmuss Professor
of Social Policy, LSE
Enrique Pealosa, Urban Vision and
Strategy Consultant, City of Bogot, Mayor,
City of Bogot, 1998-2001
Edgar Pieterse, Director, African Centre
for Cities, University of Cape Town
Richard Rogers, Founder, Rogers Stirk
Harbour + Partners
Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of
Sociology, Columbia University
David Satterthwaite, Senior Fellow, Human
Settlements Group and Editor, Environment

and Urbanization, International Institute

for Environment and Development (IIED)
Deyan Sudjic, Director, Design Museum,
London
Alejandro Zaera Polo, Dean, School of
Architecture, Princeton University and
Director, Alejandro Zaera Polo Architects
STAFF
Sobia Ahmad Kaker, Researcher
Andrew Altman, Visiting Senior Fellow
Karl Baker, Researcher
Kiera Blakey, Programme Coordinator,
Communications Assistant
mer avuolu, Project Manager
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Coordinator
Graham Floater, Principal Research Fellow
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Catarina Heeckt, Researcher
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Programme
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and Operations Co-ordinator
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Jonathan Silver, Researcher
Mona Sloane, Researcher, Programme
Coordinator
Duncan Smith, Research Officer
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Adam Towle, Urban Designer and
Researcher
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ALFRED HERRHAUSEN SOCIETY, THE
INTERNATIONAL FORUM OF DEUTSCHE
BANK
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Project Developer
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Matussek
CONFERENCE MANAGEMENT
AND LOGISTICS
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mer avuolu, Conference Coordinator,
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Rio de Janeiro, LSE Cities
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de Janeiro, LSE Cities
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Agency, Rio de Janeiro
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Operations Coordinator, LSE Cities
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and Communications
PRODUCTION
mer avuolu, Publication Coordinator
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Atelier Works, Design
CONTACT
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Copyright this collection LSE Cities 2013

Each article the author
Each photograph the photographer
First published in 2013
LSE Cities
London School of Economics and Political
Science Houghton Street London WC2A
2AE UK
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation
of short passages for the purposes of
criticism and review, no part of this
publication may be reproduced without
prior permission of the publisher.
This publication is intended as a basis
for discussion. While every effort has
been made to ensure the accuracy of the
material in this report, the authors and/or
LSE Cities will not be made liable for any
loss or damage incurred through the use
of this publication. If notified, LSE Cities
will rectify any errors or omissions at the
earliest opportunity.
Unless otherwise noted, all sources for the
data analysis in this document can be found
at http://rio2013.lsecities.net/newspaper/

URBAN AGE IS A
WORLDWIDE INVESTIGATION
INTO THE FUTURE OF CITIES
NEW YORK/FEBRUARY 2005
SHANGHAI/JULY 2005
LONDON/NOVEMBER 2005
MEXICO CITY/FEBRUARY 2006
JOHANNESBURG/JULY 2006
BERLIN/NOVEMBER 2006
MUMBAI/NOVEMBER 2007
SO PAULO/DECEMBER 2008
ISTANBUL/NOVEMBER 2009
CHICAGO/DECEMBER 2010
HONG KONG/NOVEMBER 2011
LONDON/DECEMBER 2012
RIO DE JANEIRO/OCTOBER 2013
DELHI/DECEMBER 2014
WWW.LSECITIES.NET